Professional Practice – Crafty Friday
Professional Practice – Crafty Friday
This project tasked us with producing a short sting for the ‘Crafty Friday’ event at the St. Wilfrid’s Hospice. The brief requested we try to make it focused around the idea of craft and kept a positive outlook as they’re trying to improve the appearance of the hospice because many people seem to immediately jump to the morose or unhappy connotations often associated with the idea of a hospice.
For this project I began with idea generation, researching ‘crafty’ activities, mind mapping, and roughly storyboarding any potential ideas to get an estimate of how they would work and if they would fit to the desired timeframe of only around 5 seconds. I eventually decided my favourite idea was to use a paper crane. The general idea was for the crane to fly across the screen before landing, unfolding, and revealing text that would read ‘Crafty Fridays’. I considered what medium to do the project in, stop motion object animation seemed like it would be the most obvious and simple solution. I decided instead of using a real crane I would make it a hand-drawn animation; this was because I felt the hand drawn style would give it a more interesting and clean aesthetic that I wouldn’t get with object animation. It also pushes my abilities and helps me to improve my hand-drawn animation ability.
Having roughed out a storyboard in idea generation I skipped straight to the computer to get animating. I started out by roughing in some key frames to consolidate the timing and placement.
However at this point I found out that origami cranes are not easy to draw, particularly without good reference. So I spent the evening learning how to fold cranes so that I could have my own model to use as real reference that could always be placed in the correct position. This helped me greatly to create accurate imagery and the illusion of 3 dimensional movement believably while using stylised colour and shading techniques with no background.
This project tasked us with producing a short sting for the ‘Crafty Friday’ event at the St. Wilfrid’s Hospice. The brief requested we try to make it focused around the idea of craft and kept a positive outlook as they’re trying to improve the appearance of the hospice because many people seem to immediately jump to the morose or unhappy connotations often associated with the idea of a hospice.
For this project I began with idea generation, researching ‘crafty’ activities, mind mapping, and roughly storyboarding any potential ideas to get an estimate of how they would work and if they would fit to the desired timeframe of only around 5 seconds. I eventually decided my favourite idea was to use a paper crane. The general idea was for the crane to fly across the screen before landing, unfolding, and revealing text that would read ‘Crafty Fridays’. I considered what medium to do the project in, stop motion object animation seemed like it would be the most obvious and simple solution. I decided instead of using a real crane I would make it a hand-drawn animation; this was because I felt the hand drawn style would give it a more interesting and clean aesthetic that I wouldn’t get with object animation. It also pushes my abilities and helps me to improve my hand-drawn animation ability.
Having roughed out a storyboard in idea generation I skipped straight to the computer to get animating. I started out by roughing in some key frames to consolidate the timing and placement.
However at this point I found out that origami cranes are not easy to draw, particularly without good reference. So I spent the evening learning how to fold cranes so that I could have my own model to use as real reference that could always be placed in the correct position. This helped me greatly to create accurate imagery and the illusion of 3 dimensional movement believably while using stylised colour and shading techniques with no background.
Having a good model to reference, and several extras to fold and unfold to assure good positions for the unfolding parts of the animation, I began to work on the main frames sketching out the motion trying to get believable movement, particularly in the wings. Once I was happy with the motion and general positioning of the sketched animation I began to add colour and shading before finally removing the original sketch layer to give me a crisp angular style for the final animation. To finish of the animation I still had to put the text on to the animation. The challenge in this was placing it on the frames where the paper was unfolding as I had to imitate the distorted style of the text. This proved less challenging than I had expected however as I could simply create a text layer, rasterise it, and select and distort the appropriate areas to give it the appearance of adhering to the contours of the papers folds.
The
typography and the hand-drawn aspects didn’t merge together very well, I
considered various different colours to try and merge them more smoothly but it
never seemed to work to an agreeable standard. I persisted with the font I was
using as I thought it would be appropriate to use the same font they use on the
Crafty Friday website. Instead of making the font fit in with the style of my
animation I let it contrast in the final frame as a harsh black colour, this
makes the text look more like a title as it grabs attention which I felt was
appropriate as it ensures the viewer won’t overlook the writing.
Overall I
think this animation was a fairly effective answer to the brief. It captures
the idea of craft as requested while also adding in a fantastical element by
bringing the paper crane to life.
I was somewhat happy with the result of the animation aesthetically, I would have liked to get a better idea of how the shadow would work, which could have been achieved by placing a lamp over one of my cranes and referencing the shadow as I did the original crane.
Another potential issue was that I animated it in a HDV, 1440 x 1080 px resolution which was intended to be 1920 x 1080. This isn't too much of an issue as cutting the borders slightly to fit other sizes doesn't cut out any important information as I designed it with a central focus.
I was somewhat happy with the result of the animation aesthetically, I would have liked to get a better idea of how the shadow would work, which could have been achieved by placing a lamp over one of my cranes and referencing the shadow as I did the original crane.
Another potential issue was that I animated it in a HDV, 1440 x 1080 px resolution which was intended to be 1920 x 1080. This isn't too much of an issue as cutting the borders slightly to fit other sizes doesn't cut out any important information as I designed it with a central focus.
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