Ideas for My Animation Assignment

For my assignment, I would like to make an animation which parodies "The Price is Right" using celebrities and such. It would essentially be a very quirky and nonsensical piece, akin to my sense of humour. There wasn't any significant thing that inspired me to do this. It just came into mind. I would be importing many images onto flash to create a very "zany" effect to my animation. I plan on using magazine cut-outs of celebrity heads on top of figures drawn in flash. I think this alone would create the effect I want.

My style of animation would be similar to either South Park or Angela Anaconda. They both use cut-out animation. Angela Anaconda would be the most similar to the animations style I plan on using, whereas South Park would follow the same script and content that I plan on using.

I realize that this will be a very tedious task, having to animate the characters mouths and cropping out the heads. Also, just finding the heads I want will be a difficult task. I will also probably most of the techniques learned during the Flash turorials, most notably tweening and creating motion graphics.

If I am unable to find these cut-outs, I can simply opt to just draw the heads as caricatures of the celebrities or just create my own characters all together.

Movie Poster

Artist Statement

The movie I decided to base my poster on is “The Grudge”. Long black hair is iconic to the movie, and so I thought that the hair would be the base for my poster. Through trial and error, I came to the conclusion that a white skinned hand clawing through the hair would prove to be the most eerie and effective way of promoting the movie. Using different shots of my hand and a long black wig, I was able to bring my poster together. I didn’t want to bring in too many elements into my poster, as I wanted it to stay simple. I personally believe that the simplicity also helps to make it much creepier. Despite its simplicity, I encountered many large obstacles along the way. The first difficulty was the background of hair. I had to crop this hair from a much larger picture, and that was a real pain. Because of the lighting in the room that I took the picture in, some parts of the wig were much brighter than other parts making the cropping process very stressful. Increasing the tolerance didn’t help either as it made the hair look very splotchy, losing the eerie effect. I got through this problem by making it a layer over a black background, the blur tool and various filters. The next issue was my hands. I initially wanted the hand to blue, so I inverted the colours of my fingers. While I did get the colour I wanted, the shadows on the fingers also reversed, making the whole hand look very awkward. As a result, I had to take new photos and fiddle around with the lighting to get it to look right. After doing this, I got the colour and the shadows right, but overall it seemed to clash with the rest of the poster. The red font with the blue fingers seemed kind of cheesy, so I changed the fingers to white. The final problem I had was blending. Making the fingers fit in naturally was an extremely difficult task. In fact, I had to cut out new pieces of hair to cover the top portions of the fingers so it would look right. Furthermore, I couldn’t just slap on these pieces of hair, I had to make them flow with the hair in the background. It looked really bad otherwise. I also needed the text to fit in nicely, and through the blur tool, this was accomplished. Because the hand colour was so un-natural, it also clashed with the background. I had to experiment with different filters and saturation to get it to blend well. I still think that there are some blending issues, but I did the best that I could and I think it looks fine.

Comments:

Well, I learned a lot from this project...many of the things, however, do not concern the program itself. The biggest thing I had to learn how to manipulate was lighting. As I described, this was one of my major difficulties. Although it may seem like such a minor thing, lighting is extremely important as it can separate a cheesy poster from a striking poster. Also, honestly speaking, I chose to do a horror movie poster because I thought it would be very easy...Boy was I surprised. I quickly learned that horror posters are quite difficult, as the littlest things can make it look corny. I went through about 6 concepts until I found one that wasn't laughable. From the critiques that I got, I realized that my text should have been a little more striking. While the font and colour were fine, it could have been a bit larger; again, if it was too big though, it would come off as corny...Despite horror being a major pain in the butt, I have to say, it did pay off...even though my intentions were so much. From this, I learned a lot about design, spacing, and colour schemes. All of it has to be near perfect for a horror poster to be truely

Typography

This poster for Tim Burton's, "Corpse Bride" uses a very quirky and somewhat creepy type. The slogan doesn't present anything special, but the movie title is quite interesting. Firstly, it establishes the nature of the movie as the type is very "Burton-esque". His movies tend to have that quirky, gothic feel to it and this type portrays that. Secondly, if you look at the poster closely, you can see little curled vines on the borders. These vines play nicely with the type as they both mimic each other. The curls of the vines look similar to the curls and rough edges of the title. Overall, they type is quite effective in enhancing the poster's message; and although the slogan type is a bit bland, it actually works well with the rest of poster as it creates contrast to the dark, gothic feel of the other images.






The type on this bottle of Mountain dew is kinda cool...The acutal font is nothing special but the effects are what make it interesting. They made it so that the words are almost flowing with the movements in the background, creating the illusion of dynamic motion...again, it's kinda cool, but nothing special. It's relatively effective as Mountain Dew is an energy drink, and this type kinda of gives emphasizes this but...overall, it's a bit bland...So...it's good, but not great. And effective, but not amazingly effective.



It's a pretty standard horror movie font; very gritty and scratchy. It's interesting to note that there are two different fonts. The lettering in white is a really sharp and distorted font while the title is a blocky, gritty font. What I really like about the title font, is that it sort of mimics the woman's flow of hair. The lettering is broken up by lines and scratches, and I personally think that it adds an element of repetition. It can also be mirroring the texture of the monster's head, as it is also quite broken up and cracked. I think it's pretty effective...but I mean, it's not really anything new; As I said before, it's a pretty standard horror movie font. It gets the job done. From the font, one can get that this movie might be unnerving and edgy.







Image Sources:

Corpse Bride Poster - Poster from my house

Mountain Dew Bottle - Bottle from my refrigerator

FEAST Movie Poster - (It won't let me post the link) from best-horror-movies.com under images and Feast movie poster.

Photoshop...Frightening Possibilities?

Photoshop...what can't you do with it? Today in class, we were taught how to edit a photo so that it looked like it was taken with movement. While I initially thought this was amazing, I started to dig a little deeper. I began thinking, "hey, if you can do this to a picture that easily...where do the possibilities end?" In other words, is every picture I'm seeing legitimate?

This is, maybe not so much frightening, but it adds a whole new perspective to the way we see things. How can we trust everything we see? And even if it was photoshopped, how could we tell that the image was altered? With all of the advanced capabilities of this program, one could theoretically seemlessly paste a picture of themselves sitting on the top of the CN tower. I don't really have too much to say...I just wanted to raise that point so that you'll think twice about everything you see.