As I am now too old to actually enter Besty, I ended up making a animated tutorial of how to make an animated film. I actually quite enjoyed this and spent quite a bit of time planning and preparing to get the best effect i could with limited resources.
This was my very rough plan and I had more of an
idea of the look and feel I wanted in my head!
A wild hippo appears!
Other then the plan. the first thing I did was the end screen... I found the biggest price of paper we had in thehouse and I first painted a wooden border as I wanted it too look like a pin board. I then used some memo paper to make 'post-its' that would pin to board, the idea being they would have links to other sites and previous best entries.
Getting a feel for the space.
I then had the task of thinking of things to draw on the back ground that you would perhaps pin to a board and also things that link to Besty such as tickets, ID tags and initials.
Also added made by Buffy!!
Now to add colour..
Okay so just chucking pencils at it didn't work..
After quite some time and trying not to just use the same colors I finished the back ground, and I quite liked the overall look. I decided to use the torn cardboard look for the title its actually really tricky to tip it so it looked half decent!
The finished look minus the 'drawing pins'
The next thing I did was to draw all the paper equipment I planned on using
Before
After
I had to draw a lot more things then I originally thought. I really enjoyed drawing everything to look cartoon like with bug outlines and bright colours!
I spent quite a while thinking about the background color and the look I wanted to achieve, I decide on brown paper, I would have liked a crumpled look but I think that would have been difficult to get other paper to lay on it well. following on from the torn cardboard I chose to ripe the letters and words out of paper just because I liked the look of it. I did end up rippling some letters in half and loosing some so had to do a few multiple times.
Testing how it would look and losing a 'L'!
Even though I use a camera for my animations in the tutorial I decided to do on a smartphone so to speak because it is instantly recognizable and very popular, and also easier in terms of drawing and animating in.
Set up and Shooting
The set up was a bit of a predicament because I wanted to have a downwards shot but The tripod I have wouldn't have allowed a perfect down wards shot or space for me to shoot from so I decided to used the tripod but instead of opening it I though I would just lie it on my desk and tie it on however this didn't feel secure enough so I tied it to a piece of wood then my desk however the wood was fairly light so with my coin counter at one end and a 5lb weight at the other i felt confident enough with it to have my camera on it!!
A success although I ended up with it the other way around then sat under the desk!
tied securely to my desk.... I hope
A mid production shot!
All was fine with the set up so I began to shoot it which was actually quite quick and had a lot of human interaction ie my hand. The above shot was of the animation being made in an animation!
Editing
I used premier pro to actually edit the animation and audacity to record the sound! I also added a watermark style logo of the sponsor as I was asked to put this in after the actual animation.
mid editing.
I have to say I'm rather proud of the overall look and smoothness of the animation and had some very nice feedback...
'I have watched the video. This girl is very talented! The video relies on graphics to convey a message. It's very impressive for someone who has taught herself to animate'
I decided to do a simple Halloween animation and when I looked at my other animations, I found that the orgami just a note was very well received, so naturally I decided to do an origami Halloween animation.
The origami pumpkin
I enjoy origami so had some origami paper which is good as it was the right color and thin so easy to fold. I had one pumpkin folding its self on screen then, 2 more joining it!
All letters ready to use!!
I had a few times where I managed to blow on the letters and get them all out of order... ah well.
I think it when quite well in the end but I do wish to make more interesting animations with the use of green screen...
