Drawing Animation 1

The next assignment we were to complete in Advanced Drawing was a hand drawn animation. This was stark contrast from digital animation that I had just completed in my Digital Media course. It was cool to do these projects back to back to see how hand-made animations compare to ones done on the computer. I wanted to keep my drawing animation very simple, since it was my first attempt at having done one like this. I stuck to very basic shapes that were able to be easily recreated after erasing them. I used vine charcoal, to draw my animation, since it is forgiving and easy to erase. However, I found that although vine charcoal is easily erased, you can still see remnants of what you had previously drawn. For this reason, I started out with a base of vine charcoal over my whole page, that way I could just rub my drawing into the background making it easily disappear. I used an app on my iPhone called "iMotion" which allows you to take the pictures in the app, and then it automatically puts them together for you, allowing you to change the speed. I really liked using this app, and found it very successful. I did a trial run once I first downloaded the app, and discovered that if you just hold you phone and take a picture, it leads to it being very shaky. For this reason I went out and bought a small tripod made for phones, so I could be consistent with each frame. My biggest difficulty for this project was trying to keep the lighting in each frame consistent. The lighting in my apartment is very very yellow and dim, and we also have yellow walls, which is why I felt that I could not be productive in class where the lighting and walls are very white and bright. Another issue I had with lighting was that after I took all of my pictures and went back and watched my animation I realized that my shadow was very visible in a few of my frames. For my next animation I plan on being more aware of these little things that can be easily corrected.I also plan on using the charcoal powder technique as my base on my sheet of paper, which will give it a nice smooth background that I can easily erase into, or wipe away my drawing into. In the iMotion app you are able to export to your animation, but you do have to pay $3.99 to be able to do this. However, I exported mine to my google drive and then imported to iMovie to change around some of the color settings, and then uploaded it to youtube. So it is possible that you don't have to purchase the extra tools in this app of it to be successful.