Wellington

To kick start this project, we first decided to do a brainstorm of Wellington City-

We then conducted some research-

• Wellington is New Zealand's centre of government and the world's southernmost capital city. It is also the country's cultural capital and the third most populous urban area in New Zealand.

• The city is home to many museums, theatres and arts festivals, including Te Papa Tongarewa (the Museum of New Zealand), the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the Royal New Zealand Ballet, and the biennial Festival of the Arts.

• Wellington is also a leading centre for creative industries, such as film and computer technology, and it is the home of the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX).

• The city is situated alongside Wellington Harbour and surrounded by natural beauty including Zealandia, an award-winning eco-attraction just minutes from the central business district.

• Wellington enjoys around 2,000 sunshine hours a year. By comparison, London averages 1,500, Edinburgh 1,350 and Vancouver 1,850.

• Incomes in Wellington city are well above the average for New Zealand with over 40% of households having annual incomes of over $89,000.

• There are 25,284 Wellington-based businesses and there has been a 22% growth in business units here since 2000.

• As the capital, Wellington is the home of many artistic and cultural organisations, including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Royal New Zealand Ballet. It has a lively urban culture, with many cafés, restaurants and performance venues.

• Weta was formed in 1993 by a group of young New Zealand filmmakers including Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk. It later split into two specialized halves - Weta Digital (digital effects) and Weta Workshop (physical effects).

Expansion of Technology

Our group has decided to focus more on the technology & designl aspect of the Wellington Region.

In recent years sudden booms in technology has greatly effected society, and how we interact with one another. Major cities, for instance Wellington, has free access to WiFi. This, along with things like smart phones have given most people vastly more creative outlets and ways of sharing their creations. For example things like Vine, Gif-Boom and Instagram give people with access to smart phones and WiFi the ability to share anything with the world in a matter of seconds.

Advances in technology have brought about more interactivity with the technology we use. Giving us the ability to use technology the way we want, creating what we want. Which is very evident in creative based software, in particular apps, that are available with portable devices. With the advances in creative based technology, traditional methods of things like animation, have been challenged and changed. Due to the accessibility to the knowledge and technology needed to make animations.

Gaming in particular has been altered by new easily accessible and portable technology. The concept of playing games has become more of a sociable activity, that someone can do anywhere on their smartphone. As opposed to 15-20 years ago, were someone who played video games would often be seen as someone with no life.

GIFs

Me and Lucie Gordon made a few more developed gifs. One being an optical illusion of light refracting through glass and water. Another was a clip of Lucie making an origami bunny, we then reversed it to make it appear more seamless.

Looking at other .GIFs

I found a number of interesting gifs to do with interesting science experiments. Another that did something simple, but then played it in reverse, with I think created a nice looping feature to the gif.

Animation

Animating a simple .gif using paper cut outs

Experimentation with gif applications

Some .gif experimentation I did with Lucie Gordon,  using vine and gifboom.

Research on 12 principles of animation

The twelve basic principles of animation, were essentially started by ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, both were animators at Disney, in their 1981 book The illusion of Life: Disney Animation. The book details not just traditional techniques, like drawing characters moving on a static background, frame by frame. But it details the ideas behind the animations.

Squash and Stretch: Is the the way a soft object or character moves due to an action. For example if a character was bouncing a ball, as the ball hits the ground is condensed in slightly to give an illusion for force being applied to it.

Anticipation: Is a slight movement before a major action to help the viewer anticipate what's about to happen. For example a character about to hit another, would do often an over exaggerated raise of their arm, to insure no viewer misses the action. Also to build interest and emotion the clip.

Staging: Is based on the theatre and that only one major action happens at a time. For example a character falling off a cliff may pause in midair for a second.

Straight ahead action and pose to pose: Is when a scene is drawn frame by frame, start to finish. Pose to pose is more drawing key poses and filling in the major movements later.

Follow through and overlapping: Are the transitions of characters from one action to another, this avoids complete stops. This adds a greater flow to scenes.

Slow in Slow out: Is the acceleration and deceleration of the character throughout a scene. For example the speed between walking and running is often heavily exaggerated to give a better sense of the character really moving fast.

Arcs: Is about circular instead of rigid movement, this gives a better sense of flow and the character being a believable organism. For example if a leg was to move the path the foot moves across from ground> air> ground would be more of a bell-shaped curve instead of squares.

Secondary action: Minor supporting actions to emphasis the main action giving more emotion to the character. For example if a character disagrees with something, they may shake their head, wave their hands and say "no, no, no".

Timing: Is the amount of frames an action has making it last longer or shorter as desired, or as needed.

Exaggeration: Is used in all or most of the techniques and principles to give a more realistic and lively feel to characters. For example a character that falls over make become flat, to emphasis how hard they hit the ground.

Solid drawing: Giving forms an illusion of actually being solid with weight and volume.

Appeal: Essentially  what the audience wants to see, classically being heros and villains. Also has to do with character charisma and likable they are.


*Research I did on the twelve principles for my 222.230 class digital animated media