Category: Uncategorized

Stop-motion animation using food

Thanks again for your great works this quarter! I enjoy your blog posts especially the work-in-progress images and contents about your projects!

I remember I mentioned a stop-motion animation shooting in kitchen using food.

Here it is! Enjoy!

Tomato Adventure from ShihChieh Chiu on Vimeo.

The Making of ‘Otter Pop’ Short Music Video

Hi guys! I owe you the process of our rotoscope animation, so i’ll fire away. Me and Rico definitely had a blast with this one, I hope you learn something from our process!

The art of Rotoscope was developed to add a sense of realistic movement to animation from the more subtle mouth movement to complex, broad action. Certain actions, such as dance offer an array of moves that read well when rotoscoped. I this video, we interpret the song Otter Pop by Shawn Wasabi by using the technique to attempt to give nuisance to the track through narrative and visuals.

Mixing the Paint: More on Story and Style

The song and the visuals play with the simplified narrative to convey the message of the video. Otter Pop’s vibe, through the artist’s point-of-view, communicates the Infectious desire to be bold, original, unhinged, and unadulterated. Watercolor is a medium that is used to relinquish control, letting the water run and pigments bleed. Although eventually settling on digital pipeline, this plays well with the theme of letting go. As is with Rotoscope, the animator relinquishes precise control over the entirety of the movement. Color was used to symbolize the vibe, with warm colors such as red and yellow to represent the ‘vibe’ as opposed to cool variations of blue and green which symbolizes the stagnancy of routine disposition.

Letting the Paint Run: Execution

We tried watercolor style to relate to the tone of the music. Early on, we tried to use traditional means of rendering, bit switched to digital when it proved impractical. Upon switching, we made sure to replicate the style by working with custom brushes in photoshop timeline.

See below for a complete rundown of our process.

Choosing a style
Choosing the Song
Later Shoot with Sound (asked 3 people to dance for us)
Initial Cutting and Editting (Premiere)
Exporting the reference video
Rotoscope Process (Photoshop)
Adding watercolor and texture (Photoshop)
Cutting the Rotoscope Animation back into the Video (Premiere)
Final Edit

A segment from our video where the colors aka the ‘vibe’ is transfered to another person before coloring process and after:

One Last Cheese: This is How We Otter Pop

So how does one ‘Otter Pop?’ Let go, give in, and take head long plunge into the melody, feeling the colors run wild while your body leads the way.

Thought on Last project

I hope you all enjoyed this project whether you made an animated film or illustration. For this project, me and Adrian decided to make an origami stop motion with a simple story about a fox and a box, and I want to share some thought on the process. First of all, it was not easy to animate a paper object as we expected because we need to consider the folding and the metamorphosis. It also take a long time preparing the props and paper animals. We have to consider how to express the animals’ emotions. For instance, by moving the ears and tail of the fox it is able to manifest its emotions. Secondly, the sound effect help the animation a lot. It bring the paper dolphin and frog to live. I really like the mixture of sound and object animation, which is different from what other forms of animation can offer. I think I would definitely love to try more stop motion in the future. Lastly I want to thank Adrian for being a great comrade. We have been collaborating since the first project. And I fell that each project we feel it keeps getting better and better. To sum up, I think I have learnt a lot from different experimentations from this and other projects. I remember a line from the other professor that I remember to date- in-between is important. I really appreciate this class offers a lot of freedom to do our projects and facilitate the creativity within us.

A list of Pixar’s Technical Achievements

WARNING: BORING SCIENCE STUFF AHEAD.

I think I grew up admiring Pixar more than Disney (Gasp! Blasphemy!) and with good reason.

The stories were just more captivating, especially within the period of time that Pixar continued churning out hits at the box office. Wether it be toys, ants or robots, Pixar films always had a certain charm backed up by good quality stories. During the 90’s Disney had a major downturn with their 2D animation that culminated with them ultimately switching to CGI. We can say that 3D CGI caused the death of 2D, but Disney just wasn’t as good at the time as Pixar was, both in story and in visual development.

There’s a reason why Pixar Animation was the key to putting animation back on the map. Simply put, without Pixar’s development of CG Animation, Disney would have been in trouble. John Lasetter, Chief creative officer of Pixar has a quote that embody’s the spirit of the entire operation:

“Art challenges technology, technology inspires the art.”

This phrase describes the relationship that exists between art and technology and has resulted in them pushing past all the limitations of computer-generated imaging. Up to this day they are continually advancing the entire field that they created through their once simple vision to use computers as a medium for storytelling.

Pixar’s Online Library houses all of the dissertations they’ve done talking about these very advancements. For those technically minded people, go to this site.

I found this thread in stack Exchange with complete links to each pdf from the library. below are all of the noteable ones, as transcribed from the best answer on the thread:

General: