Bruce Bickford

Born in Seattle in 1947 is an animator working primarily in Clay animation. His concepts were very controversial and often surreal. His first movie was in 1964/65 and it was a 10minute short of animated cars.

Reflection so far...

So far this term I have started experimenting with animation-ish and iStop Motion and have started creating my short movie. My short movie is about a young girl who is sad in a black and white world and when a butterfly flyes past and brings color with it she becomes happy. It's a very basic storyline so I am relying more on my actual animation to bring the story to life. To create my movie I am going to use iStop Motion and Photoshop. I am going to make the whole thing black and white and obviously add the color when the happiness comes into her life .. i.e the butterfly. I am going to re-do the storyboard after re-thinking my idea.

Creative Media Assignment

A little bit of Happiness – Creative Media Animation Project Term 2, 2011

The idea of the animation is that there is this bright colourful happy girl living in a dull, colourless world. Then she starts to touch things and they turn into colour. After awhile a butterfly flies past and brings all the colours with it. To do this i am going to use the iStop Motion software and Photoshop

PLOT

1. Girl is sitting on bench sad in a black and white world

2. She stands up and smells a flower.. the flower becomes colourful

3. She turns more things colourful

4. A butterfly flies past and makes the whole world colourful

Me and Sams iStop Motion

This iStop motion took us about 5 minutes and was just playing with the iStop motion software its two blobs :D


This is the first iStop motion that we have made and we will (hopefully) get better !

Animation-ish

So after a long holiday in America i am now in Animation class.. america to animation .. its a harsh reality.. So becuase of this I am 2 weeks behind so I have only just started on animation, So far I have only done the red ball and the walking cycle. Next week we start on iStop Motion, so I am looking foward to that.

Photoshop ..term 1

This term we learnt how to use Photoshop. Overall I enjoyed learning how to use Photoshop, but it did have its difficulties.

When I was using Photoshop I found sticking to one idea very hard. Each lesson I would open Photoshop and start playing, then dislike my work and start all over again. Obviously this was quite time wasting because if whilst I was experimenting and I liked something that I did, the next time I would try to re-create things I would completely forget how I did it?!- and because I did not think ahead...... I chose not to save the experiments because I never thought I would use them for things like my blog. The thing that I struggled with the most was getting my head around the different tool's and how to use them. Also when masks were used but went showing up and tool's didn't do their job...it made my head spin!

During the creation part of the assignment my planning sheets did help, if only I kept a file on the computer! So maybe doing my planning in my book wasn't the best idea in the world but it did help at times. I tried to organize my time so that I made my first avatar in the 1st Week and my 2nd Avatar in the 3rd Week so that during the 1st week I had the opportunity to experiment and try to imagine what I wanted my Avatar to look like and also complete character planning info etc.

The character planning templates were very useful when it came time to thinking of how my Avatar was going to look and how it lived and therefore what the Avatar needed to survive

Unfortunately my blogging this term was not amazing and it is defiantly something that I need to improve on for next term. The reflections and step-by-step's of my Avatar are very basic but I have defiantly learnt what to do for next time.

The Photoshop unit has taught me many things to do with the software. Thanks to the assignment giving us a lot of room to experiment, I learnt what many different tools do and what effects they can create.

Looking at my final avatar's I am pleased with them, but imp sure with each day you are using Photoshop, you learn something new so therefore if I was to create another avatar I would be able to do much more with it.

If I was able to change certain aspects of my avatar I would probably just go through again and make it neater etc ... Just make it look more professional

If I could start the project again I would defiantly save each stage of my Avatar to make for a more interesting blog!

Overall I am pleased with the progress that I made in Photoshop this term!

Avatar 2

This is my second Avatar. I took the original image and colored it blue and played around with some warrior marks using the mask tool. and then played around with the pattern tools. This is my second avatar and I used similar techniques to the first avatar.