Found

This animation fuses Dadaist collage, surrealism, cinematic miniatures and web banner aesthetics.
This piece is both a mixed-media sculpture and an animation. You may use a wide variety of media in your diorama including paint, drawing, found objects, photography, collage and any other media or technique you decide will suit the project. The found photograph must be integrated somewhere in the piece. You will be making a looped, animated dream sequence with a combination of assemblage, stop-motion, hand drawn animation, Flash, and Photoshop.

Steps:

1.Find an interesting neglected object or photograph. You might find this on the street, in your basement More than one person may use the same photo. Alternatively you may choose to use a combination of a photo of a person you know and the aged/weathered appearance of the found photo (this is a more advanced Photoshop technique).
2.Apply a character to your found object and create a dream sequence for him or her, it or them. Create a written outline of the dream including the imagery and how it will be used to communicate a narrative without using (spoken) words.
3.Develop a series of thumbnail sketches for each of the following: background, middle ground, foreground, characters and other elements. Make notations about materials, colours, dimensions and construction techniques. Consider that the elements will need to be able to be moved for animation purposes and plan accordingly.
4.Create a storyboard with all of the details of your animation. Use arrows to indicate movement.
5.Build the elements of your animation being sure that the elements that will move in the animation can be repositioned easily.
6.Photograph each element separately using a camera, tripod and a stand. Upload the images to a computer. Make a back-up of the files on a removable USB stick or hard drive. You may choose to carry out the entire animation in a stop-motion technique.
7.Open each element in Photoshop and mask out the unwanted background. Save the original files as PSDs and save a copy of each in PNG format (with transparency). Name each file appropriately.
8.Open Flash and create a new file with the dimensions 1024x 768 and a framerate of 24fps. Import each PNG to the stage in Flash. Arrange each element in it’s own layer. Name the layers accordingly. Save regularly.
9.Create an animation with a minimum of 72 frames to a maximum of 720 frames. You can use tweening and frame-by-frame animation techniques.
10.Publish your finished animation as a SWF with the quality set to high. Name the finished file with your name_animation_final. Copy the file on to a removable drive and submit the file to me.