In this workshop we were practicing creating our own pixilation animations. For the first part of the day we were just getting used to how to make them, experimenting with the timings and the number of frames needed to make a good animation. We learnt that you need around 12 frames per second to make the animation run smoothly and not look too jumpy. This was helpful when filming our animations as it gave us a sense of how long the animations would be and how many frames we needed to make the animations work.
For my first idea I wanted to try and show evolution through a number of movements, going from a crouched position to standing up straight and walking. I thought this would allow me to create a believable sequence that demonstrates the act of evolution. Before the lesson I made a rough storyboard showing what would happen in my animation.
This one didn’t work very well because as she started to walk there, it wasn’t a believable walk cycle; this was due to the lack of frames and the movements being too big. This made the animation look very robotic and stiff, aswell as unnatural. If I were to revisit this again, I would focus more on pacing the movements out and making them more natural looking.
However looking back, the beginning of the video was a bit too fast as I think the movements were too big for what we wanted to achieve. If we had had time we would have gone back and re-shot this one again and just made the movements at the beginning more subtle.
We then had a spare five minutes so decided to mess around with some more animation. We wanted to try and make it look as though one of us was jumping into mid air.
To edit these, we used Premiere Pro and LightRoom. To start with we had import the pictures into LightRoom to create an image sequence before importing them into Premiere and editing the frame rate and duration, and then exporting them as movies. This was a huge learning curve for me as I wasn’t very familiar with this process so needed help from the technicians.
Sapphire's Animation yr2 