Media Studies Year 9 Intro

Learning objective: 
To familiarise with the Media Studies course.

Key terms: 
Texts: Not just written but film is a text, radio is a text. Its what we call all media productions.
Convergent media: When more than one media form is is used for communicating a message.


Welcome to Media Studies.
You have chosen to study the fast changing world of modern media.
This course has been designed to equip you with the knowledge and skills to understand better how you interact with contemporary media as a user and importantly, to develop the skills needed to create your own media which can be used by an audience of your own.

What will I be studying?

The course is based around two activities; thinking about the media and making the media.

1. Thinking about the media
You will do this through textual investigations, whether in print, broadcast or the online environment.
You will write, talk about and present your investigations in a wide variety of ways.

2. Making the media
You will be active in making your own media by:
Researching texts and audiences
Visually researching
Storyboarding
Scripting
Planning layouts and displays for print and electronic media
Delivering presentations

Production
Making short films and/or animations
Making newspapers or magazines
Creating film posters and /or CD covers
Making web pages
Making podcasts

Editing your productions
Targeting them at audiences and users
Thinking carefully about the consequences for audiences of producing media
Reflecting on how you produced your own converging media texts.

Task 1: Using the handout provided, identify how often you consume media in any given week.

Walk Cycle

01 Animating a walk is one of the hardest things to get right.

It’s a process of falling over but catching yourself just in time. If we don’t put our foot forward then we could fall flat on our face, we are going through a series of controlled falls.

We lean forward with our upper bodies and throw out a leg just in time to catch ourselves. The slower we walk, the easier it is to keep our balance.

Each arm moves in co-ordination with the opposite leg, this helps us to balance.

As we dip down gravity is doing some of the work, our arms are at their widest point.

02 We’re less than a centimetre from stubbing our toe each time we take a step, we lift our foot as little as possible.

As we rise up, we slow down

Foot glides down heel first for a soft landing.

All walks are different; no two people in the world walk the same. When actors are trying to get into character they try to work out how he/ she walk. You can usually recognise someone’s walk even if you can’t see them clearly.

03 There is a lot of information about somebody in their walk and we can read it instantly. One thing to look for is how much up and down movement there is.

04 Women often take short steps and walk in a straight line, the legs are closer together and there is very little up and down movement.

05 Men usually walk with their legs further apart with lots of up and down head and body movement.

If we trace or rotoscope a walk from some live action footage it doesn’t work very well and appears to float. In animation we should caricature real life and increase or exaggerate the ups and downs. We just don’t get a feeling of weight from smooth, level movement.

06 Its the up and down positions that give a feeling of weight.

It’s important to understand how a normal walk works before we can start to build or  invent walks of our own.

06A First we’ll make two contact positions. In a normal, conventional walk the arms oppose the legs to give balance.

07 Next we’ll put in the passing position, the middle position, breakdown or half way phase.

08 Because the leg is straight up on the passing position it lifts the pelvis, body and head slightly higher.

Next the down position where the bent leg takes the weight.

09 The arm swing is at its widest on the down position.

10 Next we put in the up position or the push off. The foot pushing off lifts the pelvis body and head to its highest position. Then the leg is thrown out to catch us on the contact position, so we don’t fall flat on our face.

11 This is a walk spread out for clarity.

12 So in a normal walk the weight goes down just after the contact position and the weight goes up just after the passing position.

12A The first thing to do in a walk is to set a beat. Generally people will walk with two steps per second. That means from contact to contact there will be 12 frames.

This a little bit difficult to divide up though and some of the inbetweens will need to be on ‘thirds’.

It’s a lot easier to animate a walk on 16’s or 8’s (3 steps per second), it’s easier to decide where to put the inbetweens.

At first it’s better to animate a walk across the page as opposed to trying to animate a cycle.

Just to make sure you understand that timing is the most important part of the process let’s have a look at some different ones. Remember we are working with 25 frames per second.

WRITE ON BOARD 4 frames = A very fast run (6 steps per second)

6 Frames = a run or very fast walk (4 steps per second)

8 frames = slow run or cartoon walk (3 steps per second)

12 frames = brisk, Natural walk (2 steps per second)

24 frames = slow step, for an old person’s walk.  (1 step per second)

The Passing Position or Breakdown

13 One way to build a walk is to start with three drawings, first make the two contact positions

Then put in the middle position, passing position or breakdown. Raise it up higher than normal,

Try it again but put the passing position down below the contact positions, this will give us a very cartoony walk but will still give us a feeling of weight.

14 The crucial thing is where to put the passing position.

14A Try it with a squash or bent like a kidney shape.

Or bent backwards

We can delay the foot or do this in a slow step, it will look like a sneak.

The animation medium is very unusual in that we can accomplish actions that no human could and make it look convincing.

15 Deciding where to put the passing position is a key to animating a good walk, then we can decide what to do with the head, arms feet, the possibilities are endless. The main thing is to understand the mood of the character in question.

16 Once we’ve settled on a style of walk for the character we can start to think about counteraction and overlapping action. With a character who has a belly the stomach mass can go up as the body goes down.

It’s the same with drapery, when the character goes up the drapery goes down, this applies to things like hair, breasts and any other appendages.

16A One tricky thing to animate is a woman walking from a back view. The bum moves in the direction of the forward foot. Drapery would oppose the hips with a delay and then settle.

17 In the 50’s and 60’s studios like UPA put all these principles in place then played around with them.

17A Eventually, we find we’ve come full circle in the realisation that no two characters walk the same.

19 Loosening it up:

Starting with a simple walk, arms opposite legs, shoulder forward when arms go forward and back when shoulder goes back.

20 Front view, Tilt the shoulders, it’s taking the basic plan and building on it.

On the passing position the hips and shoulders are more or less straight.

21 To give more character to a walk, tilt the head once the hips and shoulders are down.

Anticipation

In animation, we have an opportunity to exaggerate real life.

Everything goes back before it goes forward, left before it goes right, up before it goes down.

This is to give the viewer notice of what is about to happen.

Often, the anticipation is more important than the actual action. For example, with the hunter in Snow White, we never actually see him take her life but the anticipation adds to the drama to such an extent that we don't need to.

Breaking Joints

The successive breaking of joints to give flexibility.

When animators say breaking joints they really mean bending joints.

This follows on from your overlapping action/follow through exercises in that you need to realise that everything doesn't move or come to a stop all at once. It's the same when a character has a tail or a man runs to a stop and his coat 'keeps on going'.

When we animate a simple thing like a hand slapping a table, the shoulder stays pretty much constant, the elbow leads the way, the wrist then follows through and the the hand is the last, it keeps going.

When the hand and fingers keep going, the elbow joint bends or breaks, going back in the opposite direction, starting on it's way back down.

This principle is really important in order to make naturalistic, flowing animation, no matter what the subject, as long as it isn't something mechanical.

Task: Animate an arm slapping a table in a 12 drawing cycle so that it ends where it starts

 and the cycle can be reused over again.

Use the images in the shared area as a guide. Do not add detail like bracelets, watches, fingernails.

Yo will be marked on your ability to use the breaking joints principle.

Squash and Stretch, Flexible faces

We talked about how flexible the face can be when a character is speaking. How mobile it can be when it’s animated to speak with the

bottom part of the face squashing and stretching.

If you look at some live action footage frame by frame you can see how flexible and distorted the face can be.

If you see those facial contortionists or gurners you can see how far we can take things when we caricature real life.

The skull stays the same because it’s made of bone but the lower part of the head along with the cheeks is really flexible.

As we said when we talked about dialogue; the upper teeth don’t change position and the lower jaw action is mostly up and down, the lips and tongue form the sounds.

The upper teeth are anchored to the skull.

The lower jaw is hinged in front of the ear.

In animation we can take things quite far if we are brave and really stretch the face.

There’s a lot of elasticity in the face muscles and even more in the animated face if we want.

Sometimes we get an opportunity to have some fun animating a character’s face; for example when we are asked to animate a chew, a swallow, a burp or a gulp…even when a character id snoring we get the chance to stretch the face.

It’s mostly about making good keys and playing about with the timing, spacing, squash and stretch.

Chewing for example is dependent on the animator bearing in mind that the cheeks, eyes, nose; the whole face being affected.

A good chew can pull the nose around, squash the jaw up and out. The eyes can help express how the character is feeling in the shot.

The principle of overlapping applies here in the face as well.

You just have to deal with one element of the face at a time, the eyes, the nose, the jaw.

A lot depends on how hungry the character is as well as who they are.

Would they open their mouth at all or would they be really noisy, sloppy eaters.

Task: Either import the drawings of the chewing cycle into Pencil and use them as a guide 

OR

Design your own chewing cycle.

Do not add too much detail to things like eyes or hair, you will be marked on your ability to use squash and stretch without gaining or losing volume.