JD Photography

Color and experimentation are the major take aways from this week. With an aspect of design colors play a role in mood and feeling and can help set the tone. Experimentation is push you mind to create world that can only exist in animation.

Liz Blazer writes in her book, “Animated Storytelling, Simple Steps For Creating Animation & Motion Graphics, “Color script is a sequential visual outline of how you intend to use color in your animated film. The process can be highly experimental, and, as usual, I encourage you to find a process that works best for you. The trick is to balance what you think looks right in your individual scenes with what helps to enrich your whole story.”

Basically, the use of colors can drive the message of your story home. Keep the palette limited because the view will not have a long time to process a lot of different colors, so keep it simple, if possible.

You can use color to experiment, but this week I opted to push my boundaries and take on challenging ideas. One idea is a challenge to shoot with different angles and a human that I will need to direct frame by frame. The second idea I consider experimental because it’s a static shot and words come to life. The words tell about how powerful ideas are, but if you don’t write them down and put in some action, those ideas are lost.

My take on experimentation is what drive my Lost Idea proposal. Too often I have a good idea that gets lost to the ether because I never catalog them to take actions. To make truly experimental work I need to actually do the work I want to do. As Blazer writes, “he wants to be paid to do the work that excites him.”

I really enjoy simple ideas that use great music to tell a story. This clay-mation forms a little clay creature frame by frame, but the music draws me in as I want to see this little formation come to life.

This piece uses great sound FX to help with the animation of this scene in a park. Great cut-aways and CUs to develop the characters, and a hilarious ending.

I use this because I like see a side by side of the different frame rates. This is something I would be into experimenting with to see how well techniques play on frame rate and how that can drive a story.

This is just amazing work.

I enjoy seeing real people in stop motion work. It blows my mind.

I asked a buddy of mine if I could share this work he did. I’ve been friends with him and a lot of his stop motion work hasn’t been published, but he’s work is incredible.

I never thought I had the patience for stop motion, but I’ve finally tried it out. Here is my first attempt and now my brain is thinking of more ideas.