Flipbook Research

For out next mini project we have to design and make a flipbook. Before the lesson I looked at a few different flipbook animations just to refresh my mind on how to make them and to give me some inspiration for how I wanted mine to look.

At the beginning of this video, we are shown the process of making a flip book, ending with the final flip book. I found this video really helpful, even though it only shows a small part of the making process, it allows you to see how subtle the movements have to be to make the flip book run smoothly. It also made it clear that the majority of the animation needs to be near the end that you’re flipping the book from, to make it easier to see the animation. In this animation, the artist keeps the drawings fairly simple, making them very linear, and I would like to resemble this style in my own work, which will hopefully allow me to focus more on creating a well paced animation.


I want to keep my animation quite simple as this is my first try at making one, so will probably stick to black and white, and either stick to outlines, like this one, or invert it and use a silhouette design.

Foley Workshop

We had a foley workshop, during which we were given a silent film and were tasked with having to put sound on to it. In this workshop, we learnt it is common in film and animation to use everyday objects and voices to mimic the sounds that you would expect to hear on the film. Doing this cuts out excessive background noise and makes the sounds more intense and dramatic.

After we were given the video we watched through it and listed down all of the noises you expect to hear, and then listed down all of the objects we could potentially use to create these sounds. We then just experimented with various objects to see what sounds they could make and how they could fit into the video. Since me and Sophie were working together we split the noises and between us. I ended up making the sounds for the man and some of the background sounds, such as the kettle boiling, pots slamming and cutlery.

For the kettle whistling in the background, I simply used my voice and did a high pitch whistle. This actually worked surprisingly well, since I initially expected it to sound to human and not enough like a kettle. For the footsteps, I just used emphasised footsteps getting louder and quieter, depending how close or far away he was. For the cups and cutlery sounds, we used metal water bottles, mugs and metal cutlery. For the voice of the man I just used my own voice, but slightly deepened.

In hindsight, some of the sounds don’t sync in time with the video perfectly, some being too delayed and some being slightly early. However this was a first ever try and I think most of the parts worked well, and most of the objects we used did actually mimic the sounds that should have been there.

This workshop was a lot of fun and taught us how to be creative and experimental with the creation of sounds. It allowed us to understand the importance of sound in film. Both of these points I will consider in future animations that I make.

More Light Animation

Because we enjoyed it so much, me and Sophie decided to carry on our experimentation with light animation after lesson. We took inspiration from the ‘light goes on’ video again, since we wanted to continue with looking at the human body and its movements, and practice using the lights and the camera. We went to a forest after it had gotten dark and we thought this would work really well when using LED lights.

When we got there we got straight into animating and trying to figure out how to draw in the pitch black, which turned out to be really difficult, however we started to get the hang of it after a while. We also wanted to use different colours in our animation so we used little finger LED lights of different colours. These were easier to draw with and they were more precise, since they were smaller and more compact than using a torch. For this one, I drew around Sophie whilst she posed. This was my first practice of drawing around Sophie, and it proved to be challenging in the dark. It didn’t really work well as some of the drawings weren’t accurate; the legs came out slightly deformed and completely different from each other in certain frames. However a good thing about this one is you can start to see the basic walking movement, which we hadn’t tried yet.

I came up with the idea of doing an animation of someone walking as this would push us a step further in understanding the movement of the human form, and also help us develop our techniques further. For this animation, because I came up with the idea, I knew what movements I wanted in the animation so I acted whilst Sophie drew around me. An idea we had whilst in the woods was to try using different colours to make the animation more interesting and engaging. We started with using green, which then morphed into red, however, we didn’t really like them both together so we just continued using the red.


I think if we could have see what we were doing more clearly than having to run between the camera and drawing, then the animation would have turned out a lot better and neater than it did. Next time I would probably suggest filming this type of thing in the evening as it starts to get to dark. This way we would be able to see better and in turn, make the animation better. Also maybe using a crew more efficiently, like having people help draw the shapes, then we could focus more on directing things such as camera compositions and following the drawings with panning. I still really like this animation and think it was a good first attempt of someone walking. As we were about to finish the animation, Sophie came up with the idea to have some light explosions as the figure took the last few steps. We used the finger lights for these too, but used 5 different colours and as I stepped made it look like an explosion. She did this by drawing my outline and then at the end moving her hands quickly to create streams of light coming up from the ground. I think it was a good attempt at making a visually interesting animation and I really enjoyed the process, and would like to attempt it again in the future.

Light Animation Lesson

In our animation lesson me and Soph were working on testing some basic light animations. I really enjoyed this lesson as it was very expressive and allowed us to do lots of problem solving and team work.

I took most of my inspiration, such as the use of people and darkness, from the ‘three points of light’ video. We kept to simple lines and shapes so we could focus on the techniques of the animation, as well as the technical aspects of being behind the camera. This was a really good video to look at before lesson as it reassured me that the animations don’t have to be complex and extremely accurate to still work.

We started off by trying to do a stick man moving. This was our first attempt and it didn’t really work however, it was useful to know what shutter speeds and the type of movements we needed to do.

I then decided I wanted to try a ball bouncing. The idea came from previous animation lessons we had learnt how to make it look as though a ball was bouncing by useing things like squash and stretch. From already having this knowledge I thought it would be a good place to start. I had Soph taking the photos for me whilst I drew the ball. Even though it is very short, I like how it turned out as the ball stayed some what consistent in size and shape and I managed to put in the squash and stretch aspect into it as it hits a surface. Next time i would have done smaller movements and had more frames so that it would have been a smoother animation.

Sophie then came up with the idea of having an underwater theme to one of our animation, so I thought that it would be good to have a big fish luring in a small fish. We then thought up our own characters and started animating it. It worked in the beginning, however towards the end when we tried to make the big fish eat the small fish, we got a bit confused because both of us were animating, and it didn’t work aswell as we hoped. However it was good to do this one as both of use were drawing at the same time and we had to try and figure out how to work in sync with eachother.

We decided that we had had enough practice with the small animations so decided to come together properly and experiment with using the outlines of eachother and using exaggerated movements.

For the next animations I looked closely at the ‘light goes on’ video. Because they used a skeleton, which closely relates to a human body, it was good to be able to see how the body was drawn from different angles. I also took note of the pivot points of different limbs. The animation drawings are kept quite simple, some having more detail than others, but the majority being simple. This was helpful when creating our own as we picked up on how to keep the drawing simple but the animation looking intricate and well put together.

For the first one Sophie wanted to try a still standing person with just exaggerated movements of the arms. For this animation Sophie was the model and created all the movements and I was drawing around her. This was my first go at drawing around a person for this particular project, and I found it difficult, at first, to time it right, and draw accurately around Sophie so you could see the light all the way around the figure. For the shutter speed, we initially had it set to 15 seconds, with a low ISO and an aperture of f19, but we had to increase the shutter speed so we had more time to draw around each other, we ended up increasing the shutter speed to 20seconds for this animation. I really like how this one turned out because the animation flows well and the outline stays clear throughout every frame. It also gave us an idea of how quickly and prepared we needed to be when it came to drawing the lines.

For my idea, I still wanted to play around with human movements and exaggerated actions, so I decided to try a dancer spinning around. For this animation I was the actor, so I had to figure out each movement and decide how I was going to make it look smooth and elegant. I decided to do quite subtle movements for each frame so that the film would flow nicely, and I think this worked pretty well. Again we had to set the shutter speed higher than before as the movements were more dramatic and larger than the previous animation; we ended up having to have the speed set to 30 seconds as 25 wasn’t enough time.
I was really happy with this animation because it turned out like intended, the movements were clear and it ran smoothly. I think it works really well and allowed us to have ago at animating the different angles of a person which we didn’t get to do for the others.

Light Animation Research

Before the lesson I decided to conduct some research into light animations so I had a better understanding going into it. The animations I found have furthered by knowledge and I now kind of understand how they are made. I now also have an understanding of what types of topics the animations are made on.

This is made of very simple drawings which actually come together and make an interesting animation. I really liked this one in particular as it has a raw feeling to it and it’s not too neat but still works well as a reference for starting light animation. It also contains alot of shapes which I thought would be helpful to use within my animations. We did end up using some shapes in our practice animations.

I also watched this animation called ‘The light goes on’. I think that this animaton is amazing and really inspired me to want to try light animation. I really liked the fact that it was all filmed outside at night, which made me think that after lesson I might want to go and experiment with this outside also. Even though not all of the drawings were perfectly drawn or always precise, it did allow me to see what a good light animation looks like. I think that part of the charm of light animations is the human inconsistencies where the shapes are are slightly different each time. The skeleton also inpired me to try and use people in my animations, which later on I did.

Final Pixilation

For this I created a rough storyboard of what I wanted my final pixilation to be about; in the end I decided to have someone walking and then falling over a bench, to end up sitting on the bench. For this to work I needed Sophie to act while I directed and shot the animation.

I was really happy with how this animation turned out because it ran smoothly and came out very close to my initial intentions. I think that to improve this there should have been more frames at the start as it is a tiny bit jumpy. However I think the rest of it is good for a first attempt at proper pixilation. I used natural lighting because I thought it best lit up the scene in a believeable way, however I think in places, it is slightly over exposed, but for a practice animation, I am not bothered by it. To fix this for future reference, I would probably use a soft lightbox in a studio so I had more control. Another thing that could potentially be a problem in the future is the yellow bin, that could be distracting from the actor. I would also centralise the action more because here it is slightly off.

Pixilation Lesson

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 is the first pixelation atimation I attempted, where I used my friend Sophie to act out the animation so I could get a feel for the technical aspects of creatnig animations. Also doing it this way allowed me to direct Sophie with the movements, allowing me to stick to my original plans.

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.

We then attempted another animation, but this time I had ago at the acting part of the animation and Sophie was behind the camera. This one worked slightly better as we had learnt from the previous test that we needed to use more frames and more subtle movements. This made the animation flow more smoothly. However Sophie kept the camera in a fixed position which meant I went out of shot quite quickly. I wanted the camera to pan with the actor, so tried again.

This was the final evolution animation that we did, which we applied all of the things we had learnt from the previous test animations. I liked how this one turned out, again because small movements and its smoothness. I also liked that the camera moved with the animation as we were able to make it longer and show more of the walking and straightening of the body.
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.

This one was very short and very jumpy, but we just wanted to experiment with timings and shutter speeds. We stopped filming as we didn’t think it was working well, but after editing it together I can see how it was useful to do. It was good to see the animation start to take off and looking back after editing, if we had carried on it could have had potential to work.

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.

First pixilation research

For our first workshop we looked at pixilation, which is taking stills of images to make it look as though something, or someone, is in constant motion. Before the lesson I looked at a few pixilation examples online to try and get some knowledge of how they work, aswell as inspiration for my own work. This helped me to create my final animations.

I started by looking at this animation by Oren Lavie, that demonstartes how to make the animation look smooth; you need to use more frames and smaller movements, and if you use big movements and less frames the video will look quite jumpy and won’t flow as well. Also most pixilation animations are of people, from this I decided I would use people in my animation.

I really liked how the camera angle changes throughout the video; they have some close up shots and then some mid shots. I like how the close up shots look and I think that they add a more intimate feeling to the animation. I also like the light coming from the window as it creates a nice shadow on the bed and it allows you to see the different times of day its supposed to be, as it moves. I think this is a really good example of a smooth animation as it flows easily and isn’t very jumpy.

I also looked at another short film, it was a little more jumpy then the video before, however is still a useful representation of a pixilation animation. This video also taught me the importance of lighting, especially when it comes to making a professional looking animation; unintentional shadows can make the work look unfinished not. Very well considered.

I like this animation because simple and low budget; the animation team also served as actors as well as designers and post prodction. This gave me some ideas to how having more than one person in my animation would work. I also like the timings in the video as being quicker makes this animation work better and smoother.

Both of these animations have shown me things that will be influential in my own work, especially highlighting the importance of frame timings and making sure the lighting is intentional and well considered. I’d like to concentrate on making my animations as smooth as possible by experimenting with frame timings and shutter speeds, with the intentions of making a believable animation.