Evolution

The first true diagram to the evolution of man was shown in Charles Darwin's first book 'On The Origin Of Species'. Drawn by Darwin's friend Thomas Huxley; he over exaggerated the size of a Gibbon skeleton to resemble that of the size of a human.

This was all done to allow them to explain to creationists the scientifical resemblance humans have to apes.
Since this a lot of parodies and scientific diagrams show the stages in between the gibbon and human including neanderthal.

This is the image that resembles the movement of the shadow from Harry Potter. The growth from an animal that is small that learns to stand and walk up straight. Some parts of the body have shrunk like the arms. The legs are positioned to show walking and the arms show a natural movement.

This is a direct link to what I want to achieve. They have used the normal evolution images and then placed a silhouette of superman at the end. I feel that superman is too far away from the main images and raised to high from the base of the image. It feels like it's a separate image. I am going to do a similar thing to this except I am going to make it better by making it more flowing.

Sirius Black

Sirius Black is a fictional character from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He is Harry's uncle and is often seen by the law as a criminal however he works for a secret organisation fighting against dark forces of the magic world. He uses a specific incarnation on himself to change himself into two different types of dog. We never see him change shape however we see shadows and clues to justify that he changes shape.

Here he is a greyhound and walks behind the clouded glass to show his shadow changing shape. It all happens in one smooth movement. As he enters the room the dogs stomach gets larger in order to match the size of a humans. Black brings his arms up as he straightens his back into a standing posture; the tail tucks in and then blends with the flow of the coat. The hair on the head grows out a little which matches the scruffy look of the dog and the snout/nose shrinks in to form the shape of the nose and mouth. Finally the details of the collar of Black's coat appears.

This is another method I could use. By hiding the actual metamorphosis it makes the whole motion smoother and has less room for error. The producers and lighting managers have also used the positioning and and direction of the light behind the glass to make it darker near the floor as he enters the room. This makes the shadow blend in a little more and allows some error in the smooth motion in the change. Looking closely at the tail it seems to disappear just before the blend but it isn't that noticeable because of the column and the shadow. The heights that are used and the forward movements also remind me of the evolution of man diagram from ape through neanderthal to homo sapien.

Actually I really like the idea of using shadows because it's very simple but very effective. Using props and specific pop culture I could show the evolution into super humans through the style of pop culture. Using different heros from different pop cultures I could end up with a lot of of different endings for evolution.

Mystique

Mystique is a character from the X-Men comic book, graphic novel, cartoon and movie series. She is shown to be a shape shifter and can change into any person. Her real appearance is of blue skin with small protrusions covering around 75% of her body. Her eyes are stained yellow in both the iris and the sclera, the pupil is still black. The hair is auburn-red, it's always kept back over the head and ears and it is only neck length. Due to her natural appearance that she cannot change; some details of her body are not visible and so she does not wear any clothes in this form.

These gifs shows how her power works in the movies. It looks as if her skin works like revolving scales with the new image of what she would like to look like on the other side. I notice that it is the front part of her face that changes first. It then moves diagonally down the body and to her back. The eyes seem to change last.

I find the idea of changing appearances very interesting because I can use my photoshop skills to show progression through the metamorphosis process over a few images. This could be the change between animal and human or human to human. I can experiment with really obvious changes and subtle ones as well.

Chronicle (2012)

Three high school students find a stone buried in a cave which activates a telekinesis power inside them. They explore an experiment with this power to become stronger. However Fatal decisions and events start to occur and they have to fight the dark possibilities of their power.

This image shows what they were able to accomplish when they first gained their power. They threw baseballs at each other and then they would stop it in mid air. The nosebleed from the character on the left is because he is trying to use his power too much for what he can possibly use. The trio came up with the idea that their power is cased by a muscle and when a muscle is used too much it bleeds. All the focus in the image is pointed towards the ball because both characters are looking at it and one is also pointing directly at it.

 This individual character has become very strong. He was showing off to his friends and was trying to play a prank on the actual owner of the car. When she got back she was very confused and suspected them of taking part in moving her car. Ater doing this his nose also bled.

Here they have used their powers to lift themselves into the sky and started playing American football. Using their power on the ball they can also throw really well even with the restriction of the clothes. Both characters are clearly in view and colours have been considered to make the main characters stand out against the background.

Zoetropes

William Horner is the original inventor of the zoetrope in 1834 however he called it a daedalum. This was then forgotten about for over 30 years until it was patented by M. Bradley in England and William Lincoln in America. It was Lincoln who renamed it to zoetrope.

Zoetropes are optical toys that use persistance of vision to create the illusion of motion from a set of still images. It consists of an open topped drum and was supported on a central axis. Slots of equal distances and size would be in the upper side of the drum. A sequence of images that progressed slowly would then be placed on the lower inside of the drum; underneath the slots. The drum is then spun and the illusion will appear through the slots. The faster the drum is spun the smoother the motion will be and the viewers can look into the drum from any position.

The most famous case of a Zoetrope was from Eadweard Muybridge. In 1878 Leland Stanford gave Muybridge the challenge of proving that a horse will have all four of its hooves off the ground at one point of it's running motion. They set up a whitewash shed with 12 bulky camera lenses pointing out of the side. A white backdrop was placed infront of the cameras in order to increase the contrast of the horse. A Prize horse was then sent down the track with a two wheeled carriage. When the horse came to the cameras; the carriages metal wheels completed an electrical circuit with the 12 wires that were placed across the track and triggered the shutter to each camera. At the time each camera was state of the art and created all 12 images in half a second. It took him 20 minutes to develop the pictures and then he displayed them for all the viewers at the event to see the results. This proved Stanford was right and it started the worlds investigation into how animals actually moved which showed posture errors in sculptures and paintings of the art world.

The images that he created could be placed in a Zoetrope and give the illusion of a running horse.

Star Wars and the Force

Star Wars is a movie franchise about a world far away where there is a constant battle between good and evil. The audience follows a particular family of the name Skywalker. There are physical and emotional battles within the main characters which causes them to make crucial decisions that decide there own fate and the peoples around them. This family are linked to both the light side and the dark side of the force otherwise known as the Jedi and the Sith. Both of these organisations use the force in different ways. The force is the energy field created by all living things and binds the whole universe together. The basic force is like telekinesis where you can move things around with your mind and access others minds and thoughts.

Here a Sith lord is using the force to choke and lift the hero. This is like moving objects with their minds. Looking at this frame I can see a line around the hero and a change in the quality. This shows that the hero has been cut from a separate clip and pasted onto this one.

The two heroes are using their force on themselves to help them when they jumped across  to the other platform. Without this help they never would have made it across. Looking at the image closer I can see that the two heroes have a very harsh edge as they start to jump and as they are flying through the air the edge of their bodies is extremely soft and show a lot of movement however the lightsabers are very solid and have a similar density to what they usually do. This shows how the characters have been placed on the image and the lightsabers have been reconstructed afterwards.

This is the animation  of Yoda that was made and used in Star Wars I, II, III. This image shows the body positioning of someone who uses the force in great extent at a very powerful level. It shows concentration and a strong posture of the body. These are certain characteristics that we could use in our stop motion film.

Stop Motion Animation

This is a cinematic process used to make static objects look as if they are moving. It is most commonly used in claymation like Wallace and Gromit. Lots of images are all taken after slight movement is made within the frame of the image and then placed on a time line with a specified duration of frames in a second. If this is used effectively it can make the impossible happen within the video.

However this can be very time consuming. For example the first Wallace and Gromit short film A Grand Day Out took 6 years to fully make.

In my group we discussed possible themes that we could explore. Since as I had already done some initial ideas I suggested linking it to Star Wars and use the 'force' to move things around in the frame. I think this would look very strange yet mystifying because the stop motion will make it look a little juddery yet its something that would never have been seen before by some people which makes it quite special. I think that this idea might be quite hard to produce because there will be flying and moving objects that will need to be controlled during the photo shoot. If there are flying object in the final video then we may have to throw things into the air and time the shutter perfectly multiple times to make it look smooth in the movie.

We then took out some equipment to try out some simple and basic techniques.

This blue section is where I was lifting my hand to signal the movement of the mug.














This purple area shows the mug moving across the frame into the palm of my hand.






















The green area is where where I lifted the mug up to my mouth to have a drink and put it back down on the table again.

















The rest of the images are where we tried to make my college lanyard move across the table and float up and over my head. However there is a couple of mistakes during this part.




This black area shows where we dropped the lanyard with the intention to reverse the order so that it looked like it was floating. However we forgot about this and made the initial movie without Changing the order it.


This red area is where the sun had gone behind a cloud and the camera wasn't ready to compensate for the change in lighting which has majorly effected the look of the movie.

The cloud had moved for the last three frames in the movie so there is a major change in exposure which makes it even worse.

The first 8 seconds of this movie look very effective because it is very smooth and flows well. However as soon as the frames where we dropped the lanyard came up it all went wrong. All the images in this movie lasted for 2 frames of the the 25f/s. We obviously took enough images for the first part however no where near enough for the lanyard section of the movie. This shows that in this part of the movie the images need to last for more frames and I need to consider the positioning of the frames. This will make the movie a lot smoother because each frame will flow onto the next and they wont judder around the screen into a blur.

I am going to edit all of the images in the red section and remake the movie with all the frames considered for the order in which I place them on the time line.

Remake

 I started off by uploading the frames I needed at the time in order to not get confused by which frames were where in the movie. By changing the duration of each frame before you put them on the time line means that you won't have to deal with moving them across when gaps are made. The frames dont move when the duration is changed on the time line so they leave gaps inbetween them.

 This screen shot shows how I have nested the movie into specific sections of movement. This keeps it easy to keep track of each section and allows me to move sections around easily if I need to.

 Over the time line there is a line thats half green and half red. The red shows that Premier Pro may struggle to play all the frames seemlessly however sometime this will not effect it's playback quality. It is only a precaution.

I have switched over to Photoshop so that I could edit the dark images so that it replicates the exposure of the originals.

Here I have finished the frames and nested all the sections.

I have added the audio and I am cutting it down to fit the length of the film.

When exporting the video you need to change the format to H.264 and then the preset to YouTube HD 1080p 25. This is what a lot of computer systems run at with videos.

Click on sequence 01 and you can change the name of the file.

It will then give you the expected completion time and save it to the selected destination.

This is a lot smoother and I have changed the duration of individual frames to give different effects. For example lifting my hand in the first second was at 2 frames and then the cup moving started at 5 frames and increased to 2 frames after going through 4 and 3 frames. this made it seem like the model was struggling at first and quickly gained his strength.