charrr !!

For my final project I want to base if off a poem by Shel Silverstein, known as “Sick”.  The gist of the poem is about a little girl that lists off a pretty extensive list of ailments for reasons not to attend school, who then realizes it’s Saturday and runs off to play instead.

My concept is to utilize the style of a collage animation. Instead of a little girl, I’m going to have it be a little boy—then, I will “give” him each ailment as it is said within the poem. For example, when it mentions having a green face in the poem, I will apply a green tone to his face.  My idea will have the style of all my sources to have this “magazine cut out” effect, somewhat similar to the style shown in Bruno Mars/B.O.B. music video “Nothin On You.”  Regarding sound, I recorded the little boy reciting the poem to be my narrator.  As for text, I hope to “highlight” each ailment by having the name of the ailment pop up when he says them.

Smith & Foulkes

I chose to look into the works of Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith.  I had chosen them when I was browsing the links provided from the class notes and their video of “The Littlest Elf” had caught my attention.  Being a child at heart, I enjoy having family films playing in the background as I do my homework and “Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events” is one of those films on that list.  If you haven’t seen the film, it actually opens with this clip of “The Littlest Elf” which misdirects the audience to a “happier film”—but the animation and silliness caught my attention the first time I ever watched the movie.  Thus, as soon as I saw it was one of their pieces..I just had to look into their work more.

Within the majority of their work shows an illustrative touch to them, but some still retain that of actual video incorporated into the piece.  Thus in regards to categorizing their work, I believe that it reflects more of the fluid genre; where their animations exhibit seamless transisitions throughout their storyline but utilize plenty of different graphic elements at the same time.

Video: Abba to Zappa
Structure & Composition: The simplicity and white space remains consistent throughout the entire video, which definitly compliments the chaotic motion of the interchanging bands.  The graphics animating within the canvas do not overwhelm the canvas as a whole, but use the space effectively.
Image & Image Type: Smith/Foulkes did a great job to keep the simplicity of the characters consistent throughout the entire animation and utilized key, definiing  attributes of each band for the viewers to differentiate who they were (i.e. beatles with yellow submarine, kiss with face paint, nirvana in heaven, etc).  All images consisted of a vector graphic, which aided in simplicity.
Symbols & Symbol Types: Similar to the images utilized, they symbolically used key attributes of each band in order for the viewers to identify the different bands. A couple examples would be the bat for Ozzy and the yellow submarine for The Beatles.
Time: The transision between each band was a little hurried, but everything seemed to fit well together as an entire piece.  In a sense, the speedy animation made me (the viewer) feel as if it was some sort of game and I tried to beat the clock to name the all.  Which, to me at least, I found more entertaining than rather just WATCHING the animation.
Sound:  The sound reflected the video very well and transititioned to match the different bands, the base of the sound was very upbeat and went along with the time/speed of the animation as a whole.  The additional sound effects definitely complimented the piece and made it that much better.
Intent & Meaning:  I find that these are quite similar in nature, so I’ve decided to group their analysis.  In the case of this video, it was in order to animate the Rock and Pop alphabet for ‘The Observer’.  They utilized simplistic figures to represent iconic bands in an upbeat and exciting manner.  I found the intent/meaning to be entertaining, energetic, and overall successful due to their consistency of simplicity and recognizable differences between each band represented.

Motion Graphics: Seven Points Critique

Structures & Composition: The screen space is utilized very well. Especially throughout the “explanation” of the what money does and doesn’t do for you, the main character is always at the center of the screen while the background and graphic elements interchange between scenes.

Image & Image Type: The overall image of the animation is very clean-cut and vector, with what seems as an overlay over the entire canvas of a distressed/aged texture.  The entire compostion is graphical with very little use of text, thus the use of the imagery combined with it’s simplicity of angular shapes definitely impressed me.

Symbols & Symbol Types: Seeing that this video was mostly graphical, there were many symbols and symbolic colors used.  To start with would be the main character of the dollar, which besides it’s simplistic, geometric design—it still exhibits the colors and elegance of the dollar bills design.  Other symbols considered would be the cliche of a typewriter/glasses/tie to resemble him positively working, the use of warm/red tints throughout the negative portion of the animation, and the fist/scratching at the end of the clip.

Time: The time was used great throughout the animation, I didn’t find a moment that I lost interest or was confused with what was going on.  Especially through the positive portion, the transitions seemed seamless from when the character was walking down the street to sitting at the desk.

Sound: Utilizing the lack of vocals, the music played along great with the animation.  Where the first portion of the video was melodic and upbeat, compared to the second portion of heavy metal guitars.  The little snippets of sounds definitely complimented their scenes like the typewriter, machine guns, seals, and the end with the rainbow.

Intent: I felt that the overall intent of this animation was to inform the viewer of where our money goes if we are not careful to inform ourselves with what we are investing in.  The second portion of the clip definitely expressed the stress of what our money gets invested into without our knowledge with its use of sound and speed that these negative actions are being “thrown out” compared to the slower, calmer speed at the beginning of the clip.

Meaning: Similar to the intent, I felt that the overall meaning of this animation was to inform the viewers of where our money goes if we are not careful with our investments.  The overall execution of this animation was completed excellently and definitely appealed to me visually.

Lie To Me - Title Sequence

United States of Tara - Title Sequence