Silhouettes of characters and animations

Introduction: After I had finished my silhouettes I printed out the A5 sheet of separated body parts and then used a scalpel to cut out each individual piece, with all the pieces cut out I set up my light board which is a board that you plug into a computer and then it lights up with a bright white light with 3 settings. With the light board up and running I set up my next piece of equipment which was a USB camera that could be positioned to record the animations on the lightboard.

This is my characters punch stop animation, it hasn’t got many key frames and was relatively simple to create because I had planned it out on my storyboards. This animation is where I had found out all the problems I would encounter while doing this animation task. My main problem was the height of the camera itself, I had it set up on boxes on the left of the light box and this was the optimal height for the punch animation, but I will later explain this as to why it was a problem.

When it come to my kick animation the setup for the camera I had was too low, and I couldn’t fit any more of my character into the frame. My solution to this was getting a tripod to setup in front of my computer and then using masking tape to securely attach the camera on top of the tripod and having the camera cover the entire lightboard. Doing this allowed me to have all the space I need for all my animations. I wanted to keep all my frames consistent, so I reshot all the frames I had with my new setup and then continued.

This is my last animation of my characters super ability, for this animation I had to go and collect more assets to get the full effect. I needed a cloud and a bolt of lightning, so I went online and found an image that was perfect size for my needs and then tried to print it out for my animation, but I could not get access to a printer at that time. My solution to this was to place a piece of paper over the screen and then trace an outline of the image onto it, once I had completed that I used some scissors to cut it out and then I lightly shaded both pieces in with a pencil, so they would show up on the lightboard. This was the most complex animation because it involved another person so I had to control both people and try to keep all the frames consistent. It also had the most frames out of all my animations because it is a super so it had to stand out from my characters normal moves.

Evaluation: I really enjoyed doing these animations because it was a challenge to get everything perfect but once I figured everything out I really enjoyed setting up each frame with my paper cut outs and then taking a short clip and setting up the next one.