Planning an ESting

Synopsis

As the ESting begins, we will see a boxing ring with the E4 logo (pictured above) posing as a sponsor on both the sides of the ring and as the centrepiece. My character, a boxer by the alias of Fist Tuck, will be in the ring opposite a red punch bag. He will punch this punch bag four times and, on the fourth, the bag will fall over. When this happens, the stop-frame animation will slowly go to a higher angle whilst panning down whilst my character steps back. My character will begin to cheer as the camera continues to move upwards until we finally see the E4 logo in the centre of the ring upon which the animation will zoom in slowly on before the ESting finally comes to an end.

E4

E4 is a British television channel launched on 18^th January 2001 as a companion to Channel 4. Predominantly, the target audience for this Channel is 16-34 year olds. E4 has a large range of shows in its programming including British shows such as Shameless and The Inbetweeners but also many US import shows such as The Ricky Gervais Show, Smallville and Glee. For example, The Inbetweeners follows a group of British boys in their late teens as they get into crazy situations. The target audience here is, predominantly, the same age group as the characters as the relationships are most relatable to them. However, its highly adult humour makes it an enjoyable watch for most ages. In 2007, they launched a website on which you can view some of the television shows as well as watch the channel live. Other features include viewings clips or playing some of the hundreds of games and quizzes they have. E4 also run competitions to win various prizes. These range from simple funny picture contests to actually creating an ESting to be shown on the E4 Channel. This is, in fact, the reason why I am creating my ESting.

Justification

From my research into E4, I believe that my idea for an ESting is suitable to the brief I was given. It will fall under the correct time frame and the featuring of a sport (boxing) which should appease the younger and more active target audience. I also think that the level of activity makes the ESting a bit more lively and, therefore, more entertaining. The brief says that the E4 logo must be featured which my idea more than caters for with a central logo which will be zoomed in on as well as others in the background.

Set Design

Above is the set design for my E4 E-Sting within which my character, Maximillion Winkledinkle, will be animated. As my character is a boxer who devotes all his time to being the best one he can, I have created a training gym for him to be shown in.

 

I will make it out of an upturned white box and stick the E4 logo on the sides of the rings and as the centrepiece. This gives the effect of a sponsored ring whilst also incorporating the logo.

 

The design includes a red floor-mounted punchbag which, in the E-Sting, my character will punch 4 times. On the fourth, the punchbag will fall over and my chatacter will step back and cheer. The camera will be birds-eye view by this point and will then zoom in on the E4 logo. This is where the E-Sting will finish. 



Character Designs

Name: Maximillion Winkledinkle

Alias: Fist Tuck

Age: 27

Occupation: Boxing Legend

Background Knowledge: Growing up, Winkledinkle was bullied a lot by his fellow class mates because of his name and the fact that he was a wimp. One of his names was even Wimpledimple. His father was ashamed of him because of this. Then, out of a desire to prove himself, Maximillion went on to devote his waking hours to become the most fearsome, legendary boxer there ever was.

Reason for Creation: I created this character because I am a fan of the Rocky films and a sucker for an underdog. Also, he reflects my own personal feelings of societal inadequacy.

The short piece of stop-motion animation shown above features the plasticine character which I previously designed called Maximillion Winkledinkle or 'Fist Tuck'.

The animation is 72 frames (3 seconds) long. The movements that I tried to achieve were two punches and a cheer to create the idea of a victorious boxer. Whilst the cheer went well, I found it challenging to get quite the movement that I wanted for the punches. Nonetheless, I am pleased with what I have created as you can still see a high level of quality and fluidity in the claymation.

The History Of Animation

Persistence of Vision and Thaumatropes

Persistence of vision is a theory that the human eye can retain an image for 0.04 seconds. This means that what we see is a blend of what is there now and what was there less than a second ago. This theory has since been disproved because it is the brain that retains the image. Nonetheless, this idea lead to the creation of the Thaumatrope by John Ayrton Paris in 1825. This was an 'optical toy' which provided early animated entertainment in the days before cinema. It works based on the persistence of vision principle whereby you place two seperate images, that go together, on each side of a piece of card. By attaching string to each side of the card, you can spin it. When spun quickly enough, the images will appear to merge into one because of the image that our brain has retained. In the video above, you can see the thaumatropes that were created by our BTEC group. I created the bird in the cage as I had seen it before in various clips including Sleepy Hollow and I wanted to recreate it.

Stop-frame Animation and Frame Rates
Stop-frame animation is a type of animation whereby you make an object appear to move on its own by taking pictures at each stage of the action that the subject is completing. When the pictures are played together fast enough, the subject appears to move without aid. Frame rate is the term applied to the speed at which the images are played. Therefore, by having a quicker frame rate, the smoother the illusion of motion will appear. The average frame rates shown in film and TV are 24p, 25p and 30p. A lower frame rate will not give an effective illusion of motion.

Joseph Plateau and the Phenakitoscope

The phenakitoscope was invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau. This is one of the earliest devices and examples of stop-frame animation. All of the individual frames are placed on a disc and another disc is mounted on the same axis with viewing slits in it. When spun, this device gives the action images the illusion of motion. The idea was based around the theory of persistence of vision but was later replaced by William Horner’s Zoetrope.

William Horner and the Zoetrope
William Horner was a mathematician credited with inventing the Zoetrope in 1834. It worked on much the same principles as the Phenakitoscope except that the images were now on a strip that could be placed on the bottom of a metal drum with the slits in the top. This means that the faster the drum was spun, the smoother the animation would be overall. Horner called it the Daedalum but it didn’t become popular until the 1860s.

Emile Reynaud and the Praxinoscope

Emile Reynaud was the inventor of the Praxinoscope in 1876. He was the first to have his cartoon films screened publically. The Praxinoscope has a band of pictures, each slightly different from the last, which is put onto a rotating drum much like the Zoetrope. Mirrors are placed on the middle of the drum so that, when the Praxinoscope is spun by hand, you can view the images in a motion sequence. As the Praxinoscope incorporated mirrors, this gave the way for it to gain greater prominence than the Zoetrope because of its higher image quality.

Edward Muybridge
Edward Muybridge was an English photographer who was on the pioneers in motion and motion-projection. In 1872, he was hired to find out when all of a horse’s hooves could be off the ground at the same time whilst running. To find this out he “rigged a racetrack with a dozer strings that triggered cameras”.This early motion photography lead to the creation of what we can call movies today.

Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison is a very famous American inventor who, in 1888, created the Kinetoscope. This early motion exhibition device was designed for films to be seen by individual people by looking through “the peephole viewer window at the top of the device”.Whilst it wasn’t a projector, it did form the basis for what would eventually become cinematic projection.

George Pal

George Pal is another of the big names in animation. He began with making some short films called the puppetoons which were carved wooden puppets that would change from frame to frame. The process is known as replacement animation. A clip of these puppetoons can be watched above. He also made live action films but animation was still incorporated quite highly into his work such as with his film Time Machine (1959).

The Lumiere Brothers
The Lumiere Brothers were pioneers in both in cinema and animation due to their invention of the cinematograph which was a camera and a projector combined into one. It was referred to as animating pictures. Below is a video of their first films.

Willis O'Brien
Willis O'Brien was a pioneer in motion picture special effects and stop-motion animation. Whilst he never really enjoyed huge success or recognition, he is the man responsible for "some of the best-known images in cinema history". This includes, the world-recognised King Kong (1933) which inspired the work of a young Harryhausen whom he worked with on Mighty Joe Young (1949).

Ray Harryhausen
Ray Harryhausen was a visual effects producer, writer and director famous for creating his own brand of stop-motion model animation called “Dynamation”. He famously worked alone on his SMA sequences. Below is some early test footage of Harryhausen's work.

Jan Švankmajer
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech filmmaker known for his surreal animations. Starting as a theatre director, he later went on to make films for more than 20 years. One of his most famous films is Jabberwocky (1971).


The Brothers Quay
Stephen and Timothy Quay are twins known as The Quay Brothers are famous stop-motion animators. In 1980, they formed Konick Studios and later went on to make films including The Chairs, for which they won an award.

Tim Burton
Tim Burton is a filmmaker famous for his gothic-themed movies. He previously worked at Disney but his ideas were not up to their standards and so he began to work on his own projects. Later, he made one of his most famous films, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). This is a very famous piece of stop-motion animation amongst the rest of his works including Corpse Bride and a famous moment in Sleepy Hollow (1999) when the headless horseman gets his head back.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are two modern creators of animation including Team America and South Park. In 1992, soon after meeting at the University of Colorado, they created a short animation entitled The Spirit of Christmas which provided the characters that became the much loved basis for South Park. Made by animating construction paper cutouts for stop motion animation, the series provided much joy on Comedy Central with its shock-value-orientated and slapstick-like humour, branching into elements of tongue-in-cheek social satire later on. See a clip from the first episode, Cartman Gets An Anal Probe, can be viewed below.

Martin Rosen
Not all animation is upbeat and cheerful, we have the aforementioned Tim Burton's gothic style to show that. However, another man called Martin Rosen was known for creating a dark animation entitled Watership Down (1978). Based on a book of the same name written by Richard Adams, the film features rabbits being hunted down in a gory style by a hawk. After receiving good press upon release, Martin Rosen went on to make The Plague Dogs (1982) and Watership Down: The Series (1999-2000).

Gerald Scarfe
Another example of the use of creative and dark animation in sequences of the film The Wall (Alan Parker, 1982). Based on the Pink Floyd album by the same title, Gerald Scarfe created these animation sequences to illustrate the plot in a psychedelic way featuring metaphors for what the characters are thinking. This psychological animation added a great deal of association with this onto Pink Floyd's career. He later went on to work on providing caricatures for Yes Minister and work on the 1997 Disney film, Hercules. See below for an example of his work from The Wall.

Aardman Animations
Aardman Animations was founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton. They are most famous for their claymation style films such as Creature Comforts and the Wallace and Gromit films. Claymation is created using stop-motion and plasticine models. Wallace was modelled around the voice of Peter Selis and Gromit did not have a voice actor as they wanted the emotion to be shown around his features such as the eyes.

Cinema (animated films)
Through the development of animation, the industry has grown from the earliest shorts to feature-length films. The first feature-length film in motion picture industry was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). One of the earliest loved characters in animation was Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) shown in the video below.



TV Animation
There are also many TV animations such as the old favourite Looney Tunes. These sorts of shows once dominated children's programming but, contrary to popular belief, animated television shows are not exclusively for children. Particularly in Japanese culture where anime is a huge part of their regular programming for all ages.

Channel Idents
A channel ident is a method by which a channel can be identified during your viewing. In the United Kingdom, these are typically accompanied by a voiceover who will say what you are watching and what is on later. As technologies have developed, so have the channel idents. See below for an example of an E4 ident.


TV and Cinema Advertising
Many successful adverts nowadays are animated, whether this be television or cinema adverts. In many ways this can be the best way to go as animation allows you to create films where the impossible becomes possible. Some notable animated adverts include the Zingy the Flame EDF advert and the Chewits advert (shown below).


Animated Music Videos
Animation has also made its way into other aspects of popular culture, even being used in music videos. One band that famously features animation in their music videos is Gorillaz.

SMA in Computer Games
Computer games are another part of popular culture that are full of animation. A good example of this is Cletus Clay (pictured below).

SMA for Mobile Phones
Animation has made its way into a number of appliances that we use on an everyday basis including our mobile phones. This is perhaps most prominent in the modern day apps that are available where it is possible to download stop motion animated games. There are even apps that allow you to make your own stop motion animations such as Stop Motion Studio.

SMA for Website Use
You may also find stop-motion animation all over the internet on many different websites. This includes films on video streaming sites but also in the form of web ads and competitions. Sometimes you may find a small animated game to play to win entry into a prize draw or a similar idea.