Unit Reflection Essay

Throughout our time exploring animation I have learnt many new

and interesting things to do with animation. I learnt about how
some animated movies are shot in 2s and how some are taken in 1s.
Shooting in 1s means that you take a picture every time you move
the character, this is used in close scenes of characters/objects.
Shooting in 2s however is only taking a picture every 2 frames. This is
used when the character would be far away. This reduces the time of
filming drastically.

We also learnt about some famous animators that made animations

hundreds of years ago. We learnt about the history of a German
animator called Lotte Reiniger, she loved animation form a young
age even going as far as cutting a hole in her dining table so she
could shine light through. This was the moment she discovered her
style of animation, Silhouette animation. She would spend hours
cutting out little characters to use in her animations. She created the
multiplane camera that Walt Disney later improved upon. One of her
popular animations is The Adventures of Prince Achmed, this was
made all the way back in 1926.

We made an animation in the style of Lotte Reiniger in a group. Our

animation was called Abduction, It was a simple animation about a
figure walking along in the countryside, he then gets picked up by a
UFO and taken into space, There the UFO drops him on a planet
where he has no escape. Although our animation was quite short
and didn’t have the most interesting plot I think it was a important
for our development as animators because it made us learn that stop
motion animation takes along time and that its surprisingly fun.
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Another interesting animator we learned about was Jan Svankmajer,
he has a unique style of animation. It is very surreal and strange. He
mainly did animation with clay; this is called Claymation.
Some of his popular animations are Alice that was made in 1988 and
Dimensions of Dialogue in 1983. I have very mixed feelings about his
animations, on the one hand I like how his surreal approach to
animation, some of the animations have ideas that I would never
even think of. But also, the animations are strange and kind of
creepy. When you are watching them, it reminds you of a dream.
He will remain a well-loved animator for having ideas no-one else
would think of.

Me and my group tried doing a animation with clay and after

learning about Svankmajer, although it is my least favourite
animation out of the 4 I’ve done I still enjoyed making it. It’s called
Car Chase and It’s about a car driving down a road in the middle of
nowhere and getting attacked by too mysterious figures. My
favourite bit in the animation is where the figures jumped on top of
the car and squashed it. This took a couple tries to get it right but, in
the end, I feel like it really worked.

One of my favourites projects we have done so far is Pixilation.

Pixilation is stop motion animation with normal everyday objects.
We watched a famous video called Neighbours that was made in
1952. It stars too men siting outside their houses when a flower pops
up from out of the ground, for reasons unknown they fight over the
flower for most of the animation. It had a strange plot but it was very
well done and very entertaining to watch.
Another animation we watched was Fresh Guacamole by PEZ it was
made back in 2013 but Is one of my favourite animations I’ve ever
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seen. It is also the shortest film nominee for an Oscar award being
only 1 minute 40 seconds long. I like how he uses lots of different
objects and cuts then up into even stranger objects. The audio is also
very well done.

In conclusion I have really enjoyed this topic of animation, it’s

interesting learning about all these different styles and types of
animation. I look forward to doing more.