Final Piece

For our final stop motion animation we had to design an ident for the television programme e4. When we researched e4, we found that their highest viewed programmes were comedy, so we tried to reflect that in our ident. The story in our ident was a kind of a poke/ play fight going on between two people. At first we decided to do it in black and white, but when we pitched it to our teachers they thought it was a better idea for us to make ourselves black and white using face paint. We looked at the film Blade runner, as a character from the film portrays the idea of the black and white face paint. 

We filmed the stop motion at Olivia's house on Wednesday the 6th October. The filming went quiet well and the costumes went to plan.

Overall we thought our ident was successful once edited. If we had to do it again we would have used a tripod when filming so the animation would have gone more smoothly. We thought the costumes and face paint worked well. We also thought that our idea targeted the right audience (age group 15-24). 

Out of all our idents we made this was the most successful, it was edited better and the idea was portrayed the best. Our Mop ident wasn't successful, it could have been done n live action because we used a string to pull the mop around. Although this ident could have been done in live action we thought it was best in stop motion so the e4 signs could just appear and it gives a more jumpy effect that goes with the effect of the face paint. 

After a group discussion, feedback was given. Our ident could of been made better if we portrayed the black and white costume more. Like covered our whole body in face paint instead of just the face, and made our hair big and just  generally dressed up more. 

Moodboard

This is the moodboard for the e4 project. It was completed by collecting together a few pictures from the e4 programme, i.e shows or the adverts, and placing them all together on one piece of paper.

Mine and Lil's e4 Ident

Storyboard

After our original storyboard wasn't so successful, we created this one. Unlike the other, this one seems to be more realistic and we think it could work well.
The basic idea of our ident is me and lil are sitting together and a poking war starts up, but every time one pokes the other, an e4 logo appears. Eventually, it turns in to a sort of play fight.

When we pitched the idea to Jack and Darren and they both thought it was a good idea but we could make it look better by dressing up in to a kind of black and white theme. They also suggested us to look at the films blade runner and and pacific part of chitty chitty bang bang to help us with our animation.

This is a picture of one of the characters in blade runner that Darren and Jack suggested we should dress up like. We was going to have the video set to black and white and the e4 logo in colour but using black and white face paint and clothes could look more entertaining.

The doll scene in chitty chitty bang bang is also another costume idea we could look at for our e4 ident.

Storyboard

     This is the story board for our first idea on the e4 ident which turnt out to be unsuccessful. We did not really think through how we we're going to make it succed and did not carefully plan it out.

e4 Research

Brief e4 History

Channel 4's television corporation launched on the 18th January 2001.
Its target audience are ages from 15 to 35 of both sexes.
The e in e4 Stands for entertainment.
e4's sisters are channel 4, more 4, 4music and film 4.

Popular shows on e4

The inbetweeners, one tree hill, friends, glee, desperate housewives, scrubs, skins, ugly betty, shameless and hollyoaks.

e4 Competitors 

BBC 3, Viva, itv2 and mtv.

Other information 

The inbetweeners, friends and glee each received the highest number of views this year. Numbers starting at 1.89 million and reaching all the way up to 2.46 million!!




e4 ident's


Every year e4 challenge's their viewers to create an on air e4 sting. Thousands of viewers send in their stings but only 3 get to be shown on TV, which is the winner and two runners up. The winner receives a cheque for £5000 and the two runners up receive £500 each.
Here's some examples.

stop motion animation

Stop motion animation can also be known as stop action or frame-by-frame. It is a technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own.

This is done by moving an object in small sections and taking a photograph of every individual frame. When the series of frames are played back, it creates the illusion of movement as a continuous sequence. There are many different types of stop motion animation that are usually named after the type of media used to create the animation. 
- claymation, pixilation, puppet animation and object animation. 


Stop motion has dramatically changed since the 20th century, so much that It is even rarely used anymore.
Famous Stop Motion Animation

 Stop motion animation has a long history in film. Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton both created the first sequence of stop motion animation in 1898. This was called The Humpty Dumpty Circus, where a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life.

Popular Films or TV series that use stop motion animation are; The Nightmare before Christmas, Pingu, the Magic Roundabout, Wallace and Gromit and the Wind in the Willows. All 5 are very popular sucessfull tv programmes/films.

An older example of stop motion animation is Jan Svankmajer's Jabberwocky. 
Jabberwocky was a short experimental film based on the poem jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. 
In the film, the poem by lewis carroll is read out loud whilst images of dolls, toys in a nursery, paper planes and a black cat all become alive and an illusion of movement is created. 

I like this video as i think it is a very creative, weird but interesting clear example of stop motion animation. It doesnt just use one kind of object, i.e a doll, but uses real life examples like the cat and mixes it all in to look interesting.

Persistence of Vision 

The persistence of vision is a controversial theory which states the human eye retains a certain image for approximately one twenty-fifth of a second. 
After the eye has seen a clip of a short film etc, the retina will receive an afterimage which lasts literally for  a split second. So everything we see is a blend of what is happening now and what a happened a fraction of a second ago. 

Pixilation

This type of animation, live actors are used as the subject of the frame by frame animated film. This is done byrepeatedly posing while one frame is taken and then slightly changing the pose before the next frame. This technique is often used to blend live actors with animated objects in one film. Early examples of pixilation are El hotel electrico in 1908 by Segundo de Chomon, where a man and a women check in at a hotel and strange things happen to their luggage, furniture etc. Also Emile Cohl's film in 1911 called Jobard cannot see the women working. 

Later Examples of this type of animation is;

Tom Thumb, Angry Kid and a Chairy Tale.

I think pixilation is a successfull type of stop motion as I find the combination of the human life with the clay/doll life makes the film come across much more entetaining and interesting. 

Claymation

Clay animated films were first produced in the United States in 1908 when Edison Manufacturing released a trick film entitled The sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream. 

Claymation is another type of stop motion animation. Clay or placistine clay are both probably the best malleable substances to use as they have the advantage of repositioning and are deformable. Like every other type of stp motion animation, a image is formed from the clay and a picture is taken after every different movement.Freeform, strata-cut animation and clay painting are 3 types of clay animation. Freeform is the process in which the shape of the clay changes radically as the animation progresses. Strata-cut aniamtion is like a loaf of clay packed tight with various images cut into thin sheets with the camera taking a frame of each cut. Clay painting is where the clay is placed on a flat surface and moved like wet oil pants to show any style of images.

Wallace and Gromit and Creature comforts are both two very popular tv epsidoes that definatley attracted the audiences attention with their use of claymation.

Puppet Animation


Puppet animation, also known as doll animation, has been a part of european culture for centuries. It originated with the old tradition of marionette theatre.

Puppet animation consists of using puppet figures in stop motion to create an interaction with each puppet using an constructed environment in contrast to the real word interaction in model animation.
The puppets usually have a armature inside of them to keep them steady and still. The armature is usually made from metal.

One of the first films made with puppet animation was The tale of the fox in 1937, where in a kingdom of animals, the fox plays tricks and fools the rest of the animals.

Popular examples of the use of puppet animation in films are Tim Burton's childrens films The corpse bride and Coraline. Both have a kind of scary/halloween theme.

Object Animation

Object animation is a type of stop motion animation. In this type of animation, non-drawn objects such as toys or dolls are used to give a recognizable human look. 
Object animation is quite similar to puppet animation and model animation as they all use some kind of form of non-drawn objects. They are also often combined with eachother in to one film to add more movement or deph to the characters. 

Cartoon network have used object animation on there tv show. 

Apple

In this animation, we we're given 4 words that somehow had to be involved in the clip.

The 4 words we're apple, grief, eifel tower and cup.

Using these 4 words we all drew a story board up and chose the one we thought would work best.

Our chosen story for the animation was the apple was on holiday and wanted to look at the eifel tower but was too small to see it, so the apple see's the cup and tries to climb up it to get a better view, but falls in the cup on his final attepmt.

The animation was very successfull and everything worked out well.

Mop Around

In this animation, we wanted to make it look as if the mop was dancing.

As we couldnt get the mop to stand up in different positions by its self, we tied to pieces of string to it either side and two of us pulled each side.

It was quite hard to get the mop to move all different places but with a bit of music and some editing we  made it look presentable in the end.