Animation is impressive

Coming into this Motion Graphics and Animation class, I can confidently say I know nothing about animating. I've never used After Effects or Maya before, but I plan on being able to improve my skills throughout the next few months of the year. Animated movies have always been a very important part of my life, especially Pixar and Disney movies, and I have always found animators to be some of the most talented people. When I was in London, I had an internship at Objective Productions, where one part of it was finding facts about different animated movies, including Shrek, Frozen and Bambi. It was interesting to view the commentary on how they created Frozen, a very recent Disney film to how they animated Bambi, the first Disney film ever created. The content that I viewed showed me the evolution of cartoon animation and how everything used to be drawn by hand while now everything is digitally animated and it can take days just to animate a characters hair! Overall, animation is something that I really admire, and I am excited to become more knowledgeable on how to create certain things for all of the projects that we are going to do in class.

Here is the link to the Frozen documentary I watched: 

https://vimeo.com/105934014

And here is the documentary on Bambi I watched: 

Stop-Motion Animation

When someone mentions animation, the first ideas that come to mind are works by famous companies such as Pixar and DreamWorks. Movies like How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek, and Finding Nemo have illustrated the power of graphical animation by developing complicated and concise fictional worlds. But, animation doesn't just stop with cartoon movies. Stop-Motion Animation provides an alternative approach to animation that utilizes all forms of media to create a polished project: still images, sound, video, clay figures (actors), set modeling, and the story-boarding process. One of my favorite stop-motion films, as a child, was Aardman Animations' Wallace and Gromit. Not only did the British stop-motion comedy consist of four short films, but it also included one feature-length film. The academy-nominated relationship, of the two main characters, grows over the course of the series as Wallace's new ideas are constantly met with Gromit's "unimpressed" body language and humorous facial expressions.

                 

This stop-motion graphics artist (below) decided to take the "Wallace and Gromit approach" a step further. With the recent release of Warner Brothers' The Lego Movie, YouTube user, "cheesybricks," takes a stab at his own version of stop-motion animation with the Lego theme in mind. In this short video, watch as the artist "paints with lego."

                     Video Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxy1fkrXmCI#t=85

This video really opened my mind to the possibilities that one can achieve in animation as a field of study. Perhaps, it will be something that I will pursue in the future. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy its prestige!