Retro Cartoons

As a style for my animation the style of retro cartoons from around the 1950's is a style that really like. The key elements I think would work really well for this project these elements being the use of shading and simplicity, it is also a semi realistic animation style.  I decided to look at these further by searching for examples. To look at the visual style further as well as the way they are animated which should hopefully give me a clearer idea of what I wanted to do. 

Looking through a number of example

s I really like the way the characters are drawn it's a really fun style. They all have these massive noses that helps shape the face and then these tiny legs and often arms and then a simple shape for the body which has added detail for clothes. Which sounds like it shouldn't work but when you see it together it just does. As I said I think this is a really fun style and it will stop my animation from looking too serious considering the subject. Also with the ideas I have so far for my animation I think I could make a unique main character for it which would add a story element. 

As for backgrounds these are kept simple often they are not that defined and there is just textures with blocks of colour and the other elements of the background would be added in by lines. This style works and backgrounds and flat coloured characters go together really well. So far for my ideas I have a variety of backgrounds so I think this style would stop me spending too much time on these elements but also differentiate between the backgrounds well. 

The animation style is also not as complicated as more modern styles which suite the art style and the backgrounds as well. Also it will help me as it's my first project on After Effects. 

It is also (at this point) a wide theme to follow so it gives me freedom to experiment and play around with the visual style a little bit sticking to the overall style of a vintage cartoon. 

Music

After having a long search I finally found a piece of music that I want to use for my animation. It has the vintage rock feel that I was after and I think it will help my animation stand out. The track is called 'Gold on the ceiling' by The Black Keys the first 28 seconds or so are instrumental intro this is the part of the song I will be using. I fairly confident the track will work with the animation i'm also hopeful as I  don't have many other ideas on the music.

The track can be heard here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yCIDkFI7ew

Sound Effects

I found a very good site for getting sound effects http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds/ which pretty much has most of the sounds I would need. However I haven't decided yet whether I will use sound effects because I have a lot of parts where a sound effect could be applied mixed with the music it might get a bit too much and sound messy. Saying that though if I watch my animation back with just the music a decided it needs sound effects I will look back on the issue. 

The Pitch

So the pitch was on monday and overall I think it went well although my animatic didn't really show up on the projector I think I still got the idea and message across well enough. I got some positive feedbacks on my ideas and style and also some useful ideas from the group on music and how to improve certain parts of the animation. 

Music was useful as I was stuck but the suggestions gave me a new place to go with that, which hopefully works out.  

Now I have a clear idea of what I want to do and the style I want it to be in so hopefully it works out. 

The 12 Principles Of Animation

For this project the brief asked us to research into the principles of animation as I did not know what these were I thought researching these first would be a good way to start the project. After some initial research I found that there are 12 basic principles of animation that cover all the different aspects of animating.

The principles are -

1. Squash and Stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight Ahead and Pose-to-pose
5. Follow through and overlapping action
6. Slow in and slow out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid Drawing 
12. Appeal

Typography

For my animation I decided to go for the retro style that I had researched and liked, such as the 1950's Looney Toons or the Skin you alive animation. So with my style being decided I needed a font that suited this style as well. Although I have little typography in my animation it is important that my typography fits in with the overall feel and theme, so I decided to go look for fonts that had retro, vintage feel to them. I narrowed my choice down to a few but finally decided that to go with Bellerose I decided to choose font for a number of reasons, first off I love the simplicity to the font. It is not big or flashy like some of other fonts I looked at and I think this will really work for the style I want to achieve.  As well as this it is readable and has a nice vintage feel to it. 

Visual Style - Lluis Fuzzhound

Whilst researching retro style animation I came across an animation which had a very unique style which was based around the 60's and you can see this from the similarities between this animation and the work of Chuck Jones for example. The animation had some style elements that I really liked and wanted to try out in my own work. 

The artists name is Lluis Fuzzhound also known as Lluis Sanchez, the animation is a music video for the song 'Skin you alive' and can be seen at http://vimeo.com/48997795. The elements I really liked from the animation is the drawing style, use of colours and textures. The drawing style is an illustrative style particularly for the background which just really works and also brings out the main elements such as the characters and objects from the animation.  These main elements have flat colours and this combines really well with the illustrative style textured backgrounds. 

The use of colours is also really good as even though it is done in a black and grey scheme it still looks pleasing and everything is coloured in a way that makes the parts stand out and get your attention. This is also helped by the black outlines around the characters and objects that might not even be noticed but really help the elements stand out.