Unit Reflection Essay

Tom

In the exploring animation topic, I have learnt so much about the techniques of
animation. Lotte Reiniger was an incredible shadow animator, Jan Svankmajer a famous
clay animation, both making the animation world how it is today. We edit all our
animations a piece of software called adobe prime pro; it is used by professionals we
are learning more every lesson.

While learning exploding animation, we looked into Lotte Reiniger is a shadow animator
born in 1899 and she was always fascinated with Chinese arts of paper cutting. As she
got older her love for animation grew and grew. To remember and celebrate her work
we split into to teams and did shadow animation. We worked very well as a small group
of 3, we each took our roles of team leader which was good share out. We learnt how
little u have to move the objects to make the animation smooth and about the
persistence of vision. Persistence of vision is where your eyes see a slight shadow of
something so in animation it looks smoother. Lotte used many ways to get her animation
technique perfect, like using lead to weight down the puppets. In 1944 she was
captured but Nazis and forced to make propaganda films for Germany. One of these
films is called Die goldene Gans (The Golden Goose, 1944). She had to work under
horrendous conditions. Reiniger had a unique art style in her animations that was
different from other artists in her time period of the 1920s and the 1930s.
Disney's Fantasia uses Reiniger's style in the beginning of the scene where Mickey
Mouse is in the same shot as the live-action musicians.

Jan Svankajers animation style is also very unique using similar techniques as Lotte
Reiniger. He was born in Prague. He got a puppet theatre he was given for Christmas as
a child and he loved it. He studied at the College of Arts in Prague and then in the
Department of Puppetry. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though his feature
films have included much more live action sequences than animation. One of his most
famous films is Dimensions of Dialogue is a 1983 Czechoslovak animated short film and
it is very disturbing to people that have never seen his work before. For our animation
we did a car crash clay animation where two people stop a car and destroy it. We also
used premiere pro in this task. After taking all the photos we uploaded them onto the
software to see that the camera was not focused, simple and easy mistake on the
camera man’s part, we got round it and learnt for next time.

In conclusion I have loved the topic exploring Animation and I have learnt so many
things that I didn’t know about animation, one example is how long it takes for
animation. Having learning about 2 people which have influenced animation has really
changed my views.