Documenting The Doing #6: Turntable Animation

Project number six is now upon us and this was an individual production that we had to think of completely on our own. Inspired by a David Wilson directed production, 'We Got Time' we had to re-create this turntable motion to the best of our ability by creatively drawing on a designated circular template. Choosing between a 16 frame disk and a 32 frame disk proved quite difficult for me as I wasn't too sure what would be the easiest to complete.

What to do? A 16 frame disk and a 32 frame disk

I really struggled to think of something to do that would definitely work when filming the production at a high speed. We were told by our tutor, Tim, that not all animations will work. Just because they look good on paper, it doesn't mean they'll look good on the movie. A few examples from previous students were shown to us, and it did prove that they didn't all work out as people had hoped. I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do, but I cannot draw. Drawing is my weakest subject. Amazing ideas were running through my mind but there was no way I would be able to project them onto paper. The option to use Photoshop was available, but I'm quite confident on Photoshop, so I wanted to step out of my comfort zone.

My original idea was to draw a dancer. The silhouette would begin in a standing position (frame 1), then jump into a pose (frame 8), and by the end of the production, the silhouette would be back to her original position (frame 16). This idea seemed the best in my head, but as I stated before, I cannot draw. I made hundreds of attempts to draw the dancer, by tracing and copying images off of Google, but I wasn't happy.

My original idea

After this idea, I decided to completely start again with a different idea as I realised that this was never going to look how I planned it to look when it came to filming it. With the clock still ticking I had to think of a new idea, and quickly. I thought long and hard about what I was going to do, and now I was on the idea of Iron Man. With this being my favourite film, I had the idea of gradually drawing his face in each frame, finally making up his whole face in colour by the time it was at frame 16. Again, drawing it wasn't the easiest thing in the world, and drawing the same thing identically to each frame, plus adding another section of the face, wasn't working. 

My initial ideas of the dancer and Iron Man

I had an hour left to redesign the turntable yet again, and this time, I figured it would be easier to stick with 2D shapes. Sticking with the colours I was originally using for the Iron Man idea, I decided it would be pretty cool to do explosion-type drawings. This way, I could do them differently and it wouldn't matter so much. When it came round to filming the production, I was really apprehensive to see if my final idea had worked. 

My final design for the turntable

The final production actually looked better than I thought it would. I sped it up to 200%, because even at 100%, it appeared far too slow and needed that extra bit of speed. To make the production more like David Wilson's movie 'We Got Time', as a group, we collaborated all of our turntable productions together and our tutor, Tim, produced the video. My part in the following video appears at 0.47 seconds in.

TURNTABLE ANIMATION - THE FINAL PRODUCTION


This wasn't my favourite production to do as I found it quite frustrating because I couldn't project my ideas on to the paper because of my lack of drawing skills, but I was really impressed with the outcome, especially the final group video.

Cheerio. :o)

- Olivia.