Final piece: Bird Sequence

My final outcome for my unit 4

Progress preview of final piece

Working on animating a sequence of a realistically drawn bird flying, hoping to compose a beginning middle and end, so far this preview portrays the beginning with the bird taking off to fly.

Bird take off test

Moving on from just looking at the flight cycle, now wanting to work towards animating a realistic bird flying, this being a quick test run of drawing a bird proceeding to take working with the key frames only, meaning this shot is quite jerky.

Projected animation

Deciding to take things to a bigger scale, projecting my wing flight cycle onto a projector seeing the wing cycle on a larger scale making it clearer to see the positioning of the wings at different angles through flight that would normally be obscured by feathers, conveying the complexity to flying being more than the wings go up and then go down in one straight motion.

Wing flight cycle

Video above shot without the aid of diagram in background.

Preview

Like before same flight cycle except on acetate instead, showing the lines in a bolder black outline making it clearer to define. This just a preview of the complete cycle going down.

Wing flight cycle

Like the previous diagram test video showed the wing cycle the aid of seeing where the wings should be position, now being animated without the visual aid of guidance to check that the cycle does in fact work without having the need of the diagram to be underneath it. I feel this flight cycle works successfully and runs quite smoothly in comparison to previous animations early on.

Bird is the word

Experimenting with iStopMotion software for first time and deciding to produce a short comedic sketch using observational animation through toys and a quirky song called 'the bird is the word' basically used to get use to the software and the basic dynamics of stop motion animation.

Wing flight cycle test diagram

Looking at wings in particular here and a birds flight pattern. This video above being a drawn base outline of the flight mechanism using a colourful frame diagram of the wings flight position to move smoothly when animated this cycle being composed of 9 frames for one complete cycle wings going up and down.

Abstract bird form

 Test run of using watercolour in terms of animation, producing a bird form from an abstract shape such as a heart because of seeing a previous watercolour animations and gaining inspiration to produce something similar as a trail.

BFI End Scene

During my time away with the BFI Residential scheme, I was able to use their resources and test out flight patterns of birds. Sketching out each motion of the wings in order to make a bird fly across a page. [The video above] Shows the two last scenes cut from the short, displaying the bird flying. I felt it turned out well the main concept of making the bird look like it's flying being achieved here through traditional animation.

Flight test 1

Wanting to animate a bird flying I looked at flight diagrams of birds and the positions of their wings, during a lesson I quickly composed a short animation test of a bird just flapping their wings. Making sure to have the key scenes that demonstrate the activate motion here.  Using a lightbox and camera to record this short animation.