Animation: Ulster University Ident Process and Final Piece
Workshop 1: Idea creation
I started my idea brainstorming by creating a bubble web of words I had a personal connection with when I thought about what Ulster is for me. The words I settled on were exploration and discovery because I felt that that’s what learning is all about, trying new things and discovering your passion. From those words I first thought about creating something of a trek done by explorers in a new world, then I thought about a rocket ship traveling from earth into an outer space full of planets to try out, planets with pencil landscapes and painted galaxies. I knew I wanted the journey to go from a forest into outer space but I wasn’t sure about the rocket ship so considered a balloon, paper airplane, paper bird, fish jumping out of a paint bucket, and a bunny leaping past the moon holding a paint bucket. I had to think about the transition into the U in ulster university so I came up with a few ideas for each but settled on a bird and the way a feather bends extenuating that to form a U in the end.
Fig 1-5: Sketchbook pages and Storyboard, Fig 6: animation test when I was trying to decide between bird or bunny
Inspiration and Storyboard:
After I had my idea cemented in my brain I created the storyboard and beats for my ident. In my research on a few animators I was inspired by the Disney Cinderella and Snow white styled birds for my little bird character and also drew inspiration from Eyvind Earle’s backgrounds in Sleeping Beauty for my forest. I felt The backgrounds in that movie gave it a different aesthetic that other films and enjoyed how unique it was.
In my sequence I wanted a combination of traditional drawings and digital ones and I wanted it to be obvious. I drew inspiration from the animated series “Amazing World of Gumball” and the show’s use of combining many different styles in a collage sort of way. I drew my bird and feather frames on paper, took pictures of them, and then cropped the backgrounds out and arranged them over my digital paintings to build my animation. I also combined my physical hand into the animation to then transform into a drawn hand as a way of transitioning reality to imagination and creativity.
Final Animation:
My Animation starts with my hand transitioning to a drawn hand containing the bird, I made my background painting appear as the bird does when my hand unfolds. The bird starts out with a 2 framed wing sequence to make it more choppy and paper-like, as the bird goes into space I added more frames to the bird’s flapping to make it have more weight as I drew more detail into how the bird changes color traveling through space. The Ident ends with a feather falling from the bird and gently blowing down to form a U in Ulster University. It took a few tries to figure out how to make it fall more like a feather instead of an arrow but I think that the sketchiness of it plays into my drawn aesthetic.