Moving monsters

Well, the pictures are finally in. In the weeks before Easter, another batch of monsters were created, but this time instead of the large sized creatures for the pixelation tests – which were also to show just how careful you have to be when filming animation (no fingers, feet or heads in the shot, please!), various movies were created through different animation techniques.

Five bases were created, where different methods were investigated. The methods were:

cut-out animation, using a rostrum technique

shadow cut-out animation, using lightbox and overhead camerawork

zoetropes

flipbooks

stop motion animation

These sessions seem to go really quickly and brought it home to everyone how much work needs to go into even a small amount of animation.

Mood Boards, Monsters and Eyes

Another successful week’s work all round.

After some discussion about the mood boards which everyone had created, Madevi turned the attention towards creating monsters: what makes something scary doesn’t have a simple explanation. Is it the colour? Is it the shape? Is the thing reminiscent of something else?

In terms of our groups, it turns out all of these things were very important.

Unsurprisingly, dark colours (browns, greys and black) were identified  as being important, when the monster is to be scary, but cold colours – blues and greens – were equally popular. When the monster is a little more friendly, brighter colours were used.

Horns, fangs, claws – sharp shapes – were very popular. The bug-type monster which has been created, and we reckon the twisting antennae are also part of these sharp shapes.

Most of all, however, scary eyes took pride of place. One, three eyes, blood-shot eyes, wobbling eyes. There are eyes all over these monsters – and they’ll be watching you …

We created 8 monsters – of different  shapes, textures and demeanours – and they’ll be running riot in some pixelations very soon, once the paint, glue and glitter has dried!