As part of our assignment work for this blog, we've been asked to analyse certain aspects of animation, or scenes from animated films.

I've decided to analyse the 'Minotaur Scene' from the film 'Tekkonkinkreet' (2006). I've chosen this scene in particular from the film because it shows some important themes within the film, as well as some character development from the two central characters. Below is a clip of the scene I will be analysing:

I'll begin with a quick overview of the scene. At this point in the film, the two brothers Black and White have been separated. During the time they're apart Black slowly starts to lose grip on his sanity. Black wanders into an amusement park, pursued by some assassins, after being attacked, a personification of the darkness within him: The Minotaur, rescues him and kills the assassins.

From this point onwards, everything begins to get a little surreal and strange. 

Now I'll start my analysis!

The sound design in this scene is very interesting. There's not actually that much background music, and if there is, it's very low and sinister. This really adds to the atmosphere of the scene, especially when The Minotaur shows up and begins talking. With only his dialogue and a few sound effects audible the scene becomes unsettling. The shift from near silence to sudden, loud sounds like the explosions work really well.

Similarly to the sound shifting, the movement/action speed also shifts. Throughout this scene there are quite sudden shifts between slow motion and sudden action. For example, when the assassins shoot Black's doll (0:57) and it falls to the ground in slow mo, it's immediately followed by fast action of  Black freaking out and jumping into a fight with them. Another example is when The Minotaur appears (3:10) and runs towards the assassins, it transitions to slow motion and then as the attack connects with the assassin, it speeds back up to real time. 

These shifts in speed are reminiscent of an action film. Tekkonkinkreet utilises this effectively and makes all the action sequences that much more exciting and fast paced. This is also supported by fast switches in camera angles. The switch from an angle like this:

to a much wider angle like this:

makes a fight scene much more interesting to watch, and also adds a much more chaotic feeling to the scene.

Overall, this scene is very interesting, with the sudden shifts in speed and angles, it's very dynamic. Combine this with the sound design, and the scene becomes unsettling as well. It really helps to show almost how desperate and frantic Black has become, in comparison to the start of the film where he's pretty confident. This feeling of urgency and desperation also applies to White as well, being kept in Police Custody and freaking out whilst Black fights the assassins, it's almost as if he knows Black is in trouble.

This is a continuation of the DGA 130 background task! I've now finished painting the background and animating all the characters.
I've put all the elements together using After Effects and added in some parallax. I also decided to add in a few sound effects, just as an extra detail.

You can see the result below:

Overall, I think this scene looks pretty good! The character animation works quite well and the sound helps to add a little more to the scene. The parallax and camera move look a little stiff. This is something I can improve on in the future.

For the next DGA 120 weekly task, we had to either animate a fight scene between two people, or a dance cycle. I decided to choose a dance cycle, because I thought it would be more fun to invent a dance.

Below you can see the result:

Overall, I think this piece of animation is ok. I do think however, if I exaggerated the hip movement a little more and tried to offset the arm animation a little more it would work a lot more effectively. By exaggerating movement, I would be able to create something much more entertaining.

I will have to take this into consideration whilst completing future tasks.

For the animated scene segment of our DGA 120 Module that I mentioned in a previous post, we have to create at least 5 characters and animate them!

I tried designing some fairly simple characters. You can see them below:

I thought designs like these would be fairly simple to animate, because none of them have that much detail, but they still look interesting design wise (I think anyway).

As part of our DGA 120 module, in combination with our DGA 130 module, we have to animate at least five characters in a background that we have digitally painted ourselves. I've been making fairly good progress with these animations, I've completed roughly 3 out of the five characters. You can see a test of them in the scene below:

I decided to try and make animating these characters easier for myself by creating animation that would cycle (for the most part). For example, the girl kicking her legs in the water is a cycle, and the boy reading his book is also a cycle! 

For our group project, my next task was animating the rough key frames for the Chinese Segment of the animation. Below you can see a rough test of the very first scene.

This scene is a reflection in a pot of water, hence the wobbly lines.

I'm actually quite happy with how this looks, despite not ever having to animate a reflection before.

For our experimental project, I decided to try and make small transitions to go between my animated segments. These transitions will give hints about what the next section will be focused on.

I decided to create these transitions using frame by frame drawing. So sort of like stop motion animation!

Below  you can see the results so far:

Each one is a simple doodle of things I enjoy, like drawing, tea and listening to music. I also decided that making an introduction and ending segment in this style would be wise, since it would be consistent with the rest of the animation.

I still have a few more of these to do, but overall I'm pretty happy with how they turned out. The lines do look a little rough, but that's because I'm drawing each one line by line so it will look like a time lapse of drawing.