For our second assignment we were tasked to research into a chosen countries history of animation.

I chose to do British animation in the hopes my group would want to look into Stop motion animation as it is an animation style that I love and have experimented with in the past and unfortunately felt this may be the only time in the course I would get to show my love for it.

Luckily I was put into a group with just two others, Kennie and Max, who both loved the idea of looking into Stop motion.

We decided to create a timeline and look at where stop motion began in the UK and what it has become today. Due to there only being three of us we split this timeline into set timeframes for each of us to look at and research. Kennie wanted to go with 1900s-1950s, I decided to go with 1950s-1990s and Max went with 1990s-Present.

I was glad to get the time period that I did due to 80s and 90s animation being a big part of my childhood, so was excited to start looking into what happened at that time.

My Research:

In class we looked at what influences we had to work with. I used my notepad and jotted down a few rough notes, which I then put into the discord for everyone. We also looked at the first idea for the design and had a rough sketch done.

I looked at a few different timeline poster:

Used a word document to write down notes against each topic:

I prepared a script from my research and timed myself reading it so make sure I was within my time limit. I felt a had a lot of points to cover in the time allowed so tried to get as much historical reference in as I could. I used this script on the day to help prompt me as I suffer badly with my anxiety so I wanted to have a cushion there for support.

Poster Design:

In class we discussed how we wanted the poster design to look and I looked into poster reference images.

We started to design a mock-up to see how it would look:

For our poster design we were really limited with our resources we had at home to create an A2 poster. When we were in class we all sat together and tried to come up with a rough idea of how we wanted the poster layout to look. Kennie said he would go into campus and create the poster based off our chosen design, and Max and myself tasked ourselves with doing artwork to put onto the poster. Max designed the custom pics of us that we used against our chosen section and I drew famous stop motion characters to use.

While Kennie was in campus, a second year looked at our initial mock up design and didn’t like it so we started to look at other alternatives. I had a Disney reference image that was diagonally split that I wanted to try so Kennie started to test out the layout of that.

We found the new layout worked well and we liked the presentation of it so started to fill it with images and the information needed.

We all spoke in our discord group and submitted what we wanted text wise to be added to our section and Kennie added it in for us.

I went into campus early on the day of the presentation and neatened up any text and the presentation layout of my section until I was happy with it.

These are the characters I drew out below:

These our the personal portrait drawings Max did for us (he later changed his initial design of his own to match the style of Kennie and myself)

Poster Final Design:

Reflection:

I really enjoyed looking at the history of British Stop Motion Animation, however did feel a little lost at times about what I should be researching into. I think looking back we probably should have looked into a studio development i.e. Aardman, and how they changed and adapted their animation through the years. I just felt we left ourselves very wide open without a more refined topic to research into.  For what we produced though I am happy with it, I feel like we looked at how British stop motion went from being influenced by the war and was more rigid puppetry style, adapting into clay animation and then into the use of stop motion stylised CGI (Flushed Away). As a group we worked well together and supported each other through our Discord. I feel like the limitations of software to design the poster let us down slightly and I feel like we could have definitely developed this a bit more and made it more inviting. I liked having our own artwork as a personal touch and I definitely think it added to the presentation instead of just using source images from the internet. I found out a lot of information when looking at my selected topics, but knowing the time limit in the presentation I felt that a lot of that information was lost due to knowing I wouldn’t have the time to delve into it further.

References:

Antoons (2022). The History of British Animation. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC3zBHGx8Nc&t=1362s

A+C (2007). The History of British Animation. [Online] Available at: https://aplusc.tv/the-history-of-british-animation/#:~:text=The%20first%20British%20stop%2Dmotion,and%20perform%20a%20dance%20routine

Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Clangers. [Online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clangers

aardman.com. (n.d.). About Aardman. [Online] Available at: https://www.aardman.com/about/

Aardman Animations (2022). A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman Documentary. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcMexOinKhQ.