I have always liked animation and am a big fan of Jan Svanmaker who’s film of Alice is one of my all time favourite films. I felt more drawn to claymation and stop frame animation and I learnt that there were many Czech animators, not just Svanmaker and I enjoyed watching work from Jiri Trnka, Michaela Pavlatova and many others.

I started to look at different kinds of animation. I had no idea there were so many. I had recently seen the William Kentridge exhibition where I watched short films of him making charcoal stop frame animations so I started this project with trying that.

CHARCOAL STOP FRAME

LIP SYNCH

I tried a variety of ways to experiment with lip synching. Using the digital apps and programmes was a real challenge for me. I tried various programmes and struggled to coordinate all the moving parts within them. Consequently, the best I could do was a character speaking but I could not get the audio file to load to play at the same time.

Using a much more old school drawing method was where I felt that I was achieving more. I recorded my own voice saying “Home MiLady?” and changed it in an audio app to a robotic voice

Hand drawn stop motion lip synch

WALK CYCLE

Again, I found this hard in the digital app. I created a walk cycle but I couldn’t work out how to download it. I spent a really long time and just could not do it so I played the sequence and recorded it on my phone and uploaded that.

LINK TO WALK CYCLE

https://app.animaker.com/video/XSYVIHZP2J1R52P0

Flip animation

Tom kindly tried to show me how to make a simple two drawing ‘talking’ animation which I tried but I have no previous experience and although this should be a simple process and should probably work first time, I want pleased with this but I have included it as part of the learning process!