How I Know Animation

I know the basic rules like stretch and squash, frame-by-frame and that there are a multitude of ways to animate. These methods consist of: stop motion, digital drawing, 3-D or SFM, hand drawn, claymation, machinima and so on and so forth.
In terms of my own method of animating, which I will likely use within this project, Adobe Flash is pretty good. It's great because I can use tweens for movement to save time or create a back-log of symbols (mainly for mouths) in order to quickly add them in separate frames without redrawing. However, the use of tweens is not strictly my forte and I typically animate frame-by-frame; animating in this way makes it look better - in my opinion - however it also provides some freedom with the movements of the animation. Tweens rely on having certain pivot points which might otherwise reduce the natural flow of the character on screen.

I took an interest when I was younger watching YouTube animations and naturally being interested in anime and other western cartoons. After focusing on an animation project for the Higher Project at GCSE, I had started to read more about animation and how to do it. Writer Maureen Faucette gave me an excellent overview of the different types of animations and the overall history of the craft, although the more practical skills were learned by watching Oney, Harry Partridge and SpazKid who all had HowTo's on YouTube.

Below is SpazKid's Tutorial videos:

I even had to use animation in my Media for my opening credits and music project. At the end of the day I know how hard it is to animate and the time constraints so I would like to reiterate the focus on an animatic style in order to save time.

My Project - Initial Improvements

After talking with my supervisor, some concerns have been raised which I aim to tackle and explain in order to bring more focus into my project.

• Firstly, there would be difficulties in portraying a specific historical figure such as Richard III. I've found especially in studying such a figure that it is impossible to conclusively decide on his character and accurately portray him and information regarding his past without some degree of bias, there are too many inconsistencies within his history - mainly due to incredibly bias sources - which might be a task in itself to analyse (let alone make a video). He'd be a great and relevant historical figure to analyse, especially given that his remains were discovered quite recently, however the sources are too difficult/bias to portray the 'Maligned King' accurately within the time I'm likely able to dedicate to a single video.
  It might be easier to create a video on the more factual and narrative Crusades, with this in mind I still need to know whether I will be looking into the First, Second or Third Crusades; a survey from my chosen demographic may help offer insight into this and decide which Crusade has the most interest behind it.

• Naturally, following the need to decide on which topic to focus on, I must choose a clear demographic. I will need to produce a survey which tackles the question of which Crusade along with the age of the person doing the survey, in order to clearly see which demographic I will need to adhere to. I presume that the demographic will be students based on the fact that I am a student myself, therefore having the ability to easily ask fellow students for feedback; I could perhaps showcase my final animation to a younger History class in order to gauge the duality of whether or not it is engaging to both a more experienced student to a newer one.

•  My supervisor advised that while I have said I know how to animate, it might help to go into further detail on my skills. With this in mind, I should mainly look into seeing how effective/informative the video is for the audience by taking on criticism. This is something I completely agree with and intended to do from the start by producing proto-videos in a sense, granted they wont be as high in quality as my final video.

• If this blog's site is down then I might lose all of my work, as such I should screenshot my work and place it in a Word document. This way I have some clear evidence of my work which doesn't rely on the site being up.

• I should also create a timeline for the project which finishes in around March; this is something I will likely do on a term-by-term basis.

My Project

Hello and welcome to my Extended Project blog!

Here I will be recording the development of my project digitally and in a chronological way. First, I would like to introduce the fundamental premise behind my project; through my higher level of study into History, I've taken a particular interest in a variety of subjects - particularly Richard III and the Crusades - and wish to combine my newly honed Media skills to produce an educational video. History is crucial to a better understanding of the world and our past as a species, if there is a way to better revise the material and perhaps gain interest into the subject from the youth - much in the way Horrible Histories did - then it would be interesting to explore that.

The educational video will likely inform the target audience (likely to be other students as they are studying the topics I wish to use) of either the Crusades or Richard III. To appropriately format and clearly project the information in the video, I will likely need to analyse other educational videos and assess what they do well; I've seen a few and they typically include animations or other key visuals to illustrate the information and will therefore include them myself.
As such I will be using YouTube as a strong basis for my research into the formatting of the video however the overrall knowledge will either be my own or from various libraries - I've managed to gain access to the Durham University Library and may use it to research into my chosen topic further.

I believe it is worth noting from the start that I have done the Higher Project and it was on animation, aiming to improve my ability and research into animation generally. Due to this, along with my home interest in illustration, I have a decent understanding of animations and wont be going into much detail about my abilities or the 'How to...' - simply offerring insight into the process and how I aim to use it. My main focus will be the aforementioned structure of the video and its overrall quality and presentation, perhaps even working on character designs for the visuals to show the development of these concepts.