Final Animation

Group Members: Roisin Stewart, Hannah Cummins, Rookshanara Khanum and myself.

For this animation the group had many meetings, spent many hours, and had even more fallings out.

Initially, in the earlier, happier times, we quickly decided on using plasticine models as it was something we was all either familiar with or still enjoyed playing with. Zu3d was a given from the start as it was a piece of technology we’d used in class very recently and all felt capable of using.

We toyed with a few ideas for the scientific concept before decided on the food chain  (with a little ESDGC) which seemed a plausible idea to make interested to our age group (key stage 2). Running through the criteria we decided on job roles for each person that we thought suited each person best. (We would later find out that job roles counted for nothing as we all mucked in and did a bit of everything.)

The intention was to create a forest scene where the animals of the food chain were personified, given a character and interacted with a TV presenter, who would be speaking to them whilst actually explaining the food chain to the viewer. Like the characters, the forest set will be made of clay/plasticine to keep the look consistant.

After the first meeting my job was to write the script. After using my immense brain power, I googled “food chain,” read up on in, and had the equivalent knowledge that an eight year old has. I was ready to write.

The script penned followed the presenter/narrator taking in turns to speak to each of the characters in the food chain, in order of the energy transfer, then at the end, the food chain is summed up again to reiterate it to the viewers.

As I enjoy writing I had it done quickly, including all the points we wanted to teach. The only issue was that we had to stick to roughly four minutes and the script was the length of the yellow pages.

 

After cutting it down, we decided (unwisely) to record it first on Audacity, taking on different roles and doing fairly silly voices. This ran smoothly, we saved it and decided to match up the animation to it.

The animation caused us problems to begin with as we decided to import the sound and match up mouth movements to the words. Bad idea.  After about 7 hours and a few temper tantrums, we scrapped the idea and filmed first without sound.

The animation was quite enjoyable, yet very time consuming, with the major issue being the lighting, which seemed to change in the room so much I thought there was strobe lighting coming in from next doors disco.

Two millennia later, we finished the clay animations after swapping roles, so we’d all covered everything, from movement, to computers, to directing. We re-did the sound on Zu3d’s sound engine and fitted the script around the movement.
We added the song "Four Seasons" by Vivaldi, which is popular and well used in scenes such as ours. We kept the song playing throughout the entire thing as the animation is so short, we didn't wanna disrupt the continuity.

Finally done, or so we thought, when we hit our biggest problem, which was exporting it off the memory stick, to get a HTML code. Simple process, but the computer were moving at snail’s pace and would not download. We later found out it was a university wide problem and completed it at home.
If we were to do it again, I would use Zu3d, but simplify a lot of it. I would have a basic set with less colour which would put more emphasis on the characters. I would try to use less speech and put on subtitles to explain some of the concepts. The main change I would make would be to work in a smaller group, no more than two which would speed up the process due to a lack of arguements.

Overall, it was a bizarre mixture of frustration and fun, silly voices, dirty nails, slow computers and head scratching, with a healthy bit of learning in there too.

                                    The final piece!