Final Project

Final Animation

Let's Watch and Play !! LoL

exhib

For my exhibition, I did poster, cards, cd-cover.

cd-cover has two side, front labeled TANGRAM logo @ centre, and located logo @ right downside of cd-cover's back.

 Poster, I did two color, I prefer the blue one.... lol

A tangram puzzle for play after or during the animation.

 The bottom one is the back of card, but due the print problem (back image very hard to match the top of card), so my card only have one side printed. I love this back, but...yea...

process

Before the export, I checked the whole animation and found a crush part between most two sense, there is Darker Background around the tans. Can be see in Figure 1. And also, I found that black layer seen every time when newest sense(composition layer, in After Effect) covered another one (composition layer, down side).

Figure 1

 To solve this problem, I checked downside composition layer first. Figure 2 & Figure 3(opened composition) In there, I tried to pull 'background-trans' timeline shorter than composition time.
(Animation was made by three parts:
top layer is highlighted - means currently happening,
third layer and more previous layers was stetted behind the top layer (+5, 5px far from top layer's position),
and the middle layer is on position 2, closer than third layers, this middle layer I called Trans. It is fixed and No animation, just a light grey transparence color, it's on position z=2, gives previous layer a cover color（to make top layer easy to be distinguished),

Figure 2

Figure 3 and Figure 4,(as a before and after),I changed Trans layer's timeline and did same thing on another composition layer.

Figure 3

Figure 4

 So, Figure 5, when I changed two Tans layer's timeline and put them back together, here we are!!! background looks normal. yeah~

Figure 5

There are a lot lot errors during making, but I normally do editing in after effect immediately once errors found,  I won't wait there and wrote blog.

shadow or light updated

In after effect, we can using 3D layer and light to create 2.5D animation, but should I use photoshop to draw shadows behind images, or just use light and 3D layer (with camera) to create shadow in AE? If I use AE, what kind of light should I use? Use "point light" looks better, but the shadow come from in a different way... wrong way...

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update:
I did shadow in photoshop for each frame, and use a transparence layer as a background behind top layer.
Each frame has it's own "frames" around the animation, in order to create a 'movie effect'. People will see images move toward by frames exchange.
5 frames per second, gives people time to think how animation work.

9-18 updated

Physical play

--physical activities

structure or unstructured play, they both has effective and useless sides.

For structure play, the advantages of this kind of play have clear learning objectives; there is no safety risk or security concern; and the play method is more likely to be encouraged and adopted by parents, because they think their children can obtain new knowledge from it. The shortcomings of structured play are that learn things in the play process may not be interest to the children; learning efficiency is not stable enough; and children may produce aversion thus decline to play.

And unstructured play is popularity to children interests; study time will be longer compared with structured play; children can develop their creativity and divergent thinking; it is the most appropriate way to learn valuable things; children can study the things that they are interested in. Most importantly, unstructured play can be experienced through daily life and exercises. However, the shortcomings are: play process lurked with some unexpected risks; it is not supported by the parents; children can obtain any knowledge from it; learning effectiveness and goal not clear.

Animation:

Motivate and easy follow.

Physically interactive animation program:

Proved a safe play environment, can supported or not by the parents, children can learn knowledge by themselves in their own way and play in a effective way with clear leaning goal. It avoid unclear learning content, no risk problem, no boring part. The only thing they will get from this animation program is Have Fun and Learn the Right things. 

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Tangrams are a great thing to incorporate into the mathematics classroom because they are fun, intersting, and meaningful. Tangrams "help students develop mathematical concepts of fractions, spatial awareness, geometry, area, and perimeter" (Rigdon, D., et al., 2000). Because tangrams involve physical manipulatives as well as virtual manipulatives (for online tangram activities), this caters to a variety of learning styles. Students who may learn better with maniuplitives or through the use of computers will find tangrams to be an experience in mathematics that they might not otherwise have. Tangrams present a new, interesting, hands- on way to deal with topics that most often are or can be quite boring and meaningless.

By using tangram shapes, children learn the relationships between shapes. Additionally, children learn that three basic shapes, the triangle, square, and parallelogram, can fit together to form many other shapes and figures.

When learning a new concept, it is important to interact with multiple representations of the same idea and be able to translate from one to the other. Critics of direct methods say that teaching things “in isolation from how they are applied, diminishes learners’ problem solving and reasoning skills,” (Roblyer, M.D., 2003), therefore through tangrams, children are interacting with mathematical concepts in a new way, which helps to make the learning deeper.


Another reason why tangrams are important and intersting is that "Tangrams have both geometric and artistic features. Children gain geometric insights as they discover and discuss the relationships among the tangram pieces and what they can represent" (Bohning, G., et al.). Children are naturally curious so trying to solve a puzzle involving tangrams is going to provoke their curiousity and therefore be interesting so they will be engaged in what they are doing. Also, tangrams promote growth in learning, for example, when children become experienced buliding things from tangrams, they can be challenged even more by experimenting with double tangrams, etc.

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BY: Deanna Rigdon; Jolyn Raleigh; Shari Goodman 
====> Teaching Children Mathematics 6 no5 304-5 Ja 2000


BY: Pat Margerm 
====> Teaching Children Mathematics 6 no2 86-90 O 1999

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Advantages: 
1 - Gets and generally keeps peoples' interest for the duration of the animation. 
2 - Teaches using visual aids, a very strong proven way of learning. 
3 - You may think this is funny, but it is serious: It gives animators work and helps them learn some science. 
4 - Helps to explain and illustrate more complex concepts. 

Disadvantages: 
1 - Some people think animations are dumb or for kids and won't pay attention and learn anything. 
2 - Costs money over traditional teaching methods and requires specialized resources (animators and writers). 
3 - Ineffective teaching/learning tool for complex interelated concepts due to its inherent simplicity. 
4 - Can give a false sense of safety as related to science that requires important attention to safety, such as chemistry experiments, electricity and the nuclear fields. Animations are not good for teaching safety in science.

Here are some advantage and disadvantage of the animation in education:
http://home.tiscali.nl/schopmanlanden.nl/Papers/AnimationPaper.html
 1.Skill and ability Improvement
 2.Interactivity
 3.Engagement
 4.Flexibility and safety
 5.Motivation
 etc.

disa:
Some information of real-life learning will be lost in the animation program.
Computer animation programs may function well from a technical point of view, but they are difficult to fit into a curriculum.

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animations have the potential to serve:
Affective function refers to portraying things in a humorous, spectacular, or bizarre 
way so that learners will be attracted to pay additional attention on the learning materials and 
motivated to learn.  Cognitive function refers to the clear presentation of dynamic matters (which might be abstract and difficult) that can allow learners to understand in an easier way.

project style -- Tangram updated lol

Tangram as a well known puzzle game. It is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only an outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which may not overlap. It is reputed to have been invented in China during the Song Dynasty, and then carried over to Europe by trading ships in the early 19th century. It became very popular in Europe for a time then, and then again during World War I. It is one of the most popular dissection puzzles in the world. A Chinese psychologist has termed the tangram "the earliest psychological test in the world", albeit one made for entertainment rather than analysis.

Trader, in 1815. When it docked in Canton, the captain was given a pair of Sang-Hsia-koi's (author) Tangram books from 1815. They were then brought with the ship to Philadelphia, where it docked in February 1816. The first Tangram book to be published in America was based on the pair brought by Donnaldson.

The puzzle was originally popularized by The Eighth Book Of Tan, a fictitious history of Tangram, which claimed that the game was invented 4,000 years prior by a god named Tan. The book included 700 shapes, some of which are possible to solve.

There are some documents:

How an old game might improve spatial skills and boost mathematics performance

© 2009 - 2013 Gwen Dewar, Ph.D., all rights reserved

Tangrams for kids: An overlooked learning tool?

http://www.parentingscience.com/tangrams-for-kids.html

I useTangram in my animation project: use Tangram as the main character, "play" tangram as a storyline. Combine physical play and fun animation program to help kids learn.

Physical play:

Whatever is structure or unstructured play, there are many advantage or disadvantage during the play.

link: http://playstructuredunstructured.blogspot.co.nz/2012/07/advantages-and-disadvantages-of.html

Kids play game, training they brain, develop their various skill, improve communication abilities. However, there still has many downsides. As the parent, the best course of actin is to discuss safe play with their kids, keep a close eye on them when they're playing and stop any activity that could lead to a dangers situation immediately. I was think that if there is a program which combine physical activity and also allow them to STAY SAFE.

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by the way...

Some questions that still exist:

• Can tangrams be used with all grade levels including high school?
• Are mathematicians still exploring what tangrams have to offer?
• Are there any disadvantages to using tangrams?

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When it comes to tangrams, the challenge is to arrange the pieces to form additional shapes. The seven pieces can be arranged to make anything form a rabbit, to the alphabet, to a person. 

"The tangram is the opposite of a jigsaw puzzle. Instead of fitting the pieces together in only one way, the seven tangram pieces can be arranged to make a great number of different figures" Bohning, G., et al..

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Interactivity is a mutual action between the learner, learning system, and learning material. Learners will be faster to learn, and have better attitudes toward learning when using interactive animation especially if the other techniques like audio and video are used.

Animating in animation

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1127580

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI9dDhLlqwo

After effect ( green screen and keylight 1.2 studies)

Import MOV, click Effect > Keying > keylight 1.2
Click screen color > green
change screen gain until the green disappear, change screen balance to reduce the green around hand.

After that, export frames by using Export > Image sequence

click format, choice how many frames you need per second, click OK

ALL DONE !! =)

Mental Transformation

(Levine, Huttenlocher, Taylor & Langrock, 1999)

Key Focus Question:  How can you develop confident mental modelling in geometry?
In our daily lives we see many examples of shapes that have been modified (changed)  or transformed.   This section will help to develop child's own subject knowledge about geometry and transformation, as well as skills in developing they understanding.

exploring the shape (and space maybe)
In geometry, ‘transformation’ means altering some geometric property of a shape, (such  as rotating it or moving its position on the page) while keeping other properties of the  shape the same (we say the shapes are ‘congruent’).   An excellent way for kids to model transformation is by using physical objects or  looking at shapes in everyday life and how they are transformed e.g. in fabric patterns. 

While kids are doing this, encourage them to talk with others and each other about what  they are doing. Talking about how they are trying to manipulate or meditate the objects will improve  their understanding of geometry and the language associated with it. 

video and makes it like a stop-motion video

In this stage, I will take various 'hand' video, in each part of video I will use my hand to make different shapes and do some action to interactive with the 'shapes' I made.

After that, in order to make a fake stop-motion, I have to use Free Video to Jpg Converter to capture video frames and convert them into JPEG stills.

Then re-editing them with Photoshop, take out the green background and make all shapes/hands with pattern of 'paper' quality, filling color, add shadow, make some changes, put some magic animation, do something fake.

select green color, remove it

 choice pattern and effect

add frame into each image

make a shadow (inside) effect

put layers into after effect (this is just a example)

add little fake effect - shape (example via photoshop)

After all, put all images into After effect to create my own stop-motion film.

shapes and transformation

MID-TERM plan

During the two weeks break, I will write my two research reports:

Shapes, color, learning-based animation with early child development.
This report will talk about most general question, such as why learn shape can help kids understand the real world; how animation motivate kids; how color work with animation; so on...

Transform and learning function.
This report will focus on How to guide learning by using a continuous shift of fluid movement from one scene to another. (kind of...)

Also, I will think about 'pattern' as part of my project, because kids can learn pattern when they are thinking shapes.

Shape, color, movement

Animation can help kids learn, yes, we know. They have to learn a lot of things, what content should we use animation to teach them? What they can learn through animation? Necessary or waste time? How to use animation to function they brain? 

**Shape**

----------Geometry

Simply put, geometry is the study of the size, shape and position of 2 dimensional shapes. 

However, geometry is used daily by almost everyone. Geometry is found everywhere: in art, architecture, engineering, robotics, land surveys, astronomy, sculptures, space, nature, sports, machines, cars and much more.

Young children have an inborn ability to understand shapes. Even babies can recognize the difference between a circle and a square. They can see shapes and feel them. But they need help learning each shape. As children grow, they can start to talk about and compare shapes and understand how they are used.

---------Importance of shapes in early childhood education

Kids notice that different shapes even if they do not yet know that the shapes have any names. It takes longer for young children to learn the specific properties of each shape, such as the number of sids or how the shape looks. Giving kids lots of practice with shapes can help them solidify their understanding of the 2dimensional structures. That knowledge of shapes gives the young people an advantage in many areas of learning.  Children who learn about shapes are building skills that will help them with reading, writing, and math. Learning about shapes also can help them understand other signs and symbols.

---------Some ideas of shapes

Letters, we use them daily, have a closely look, you'll notice they are made of a variety of shapes and lines. O,o, L,l,X,x,S,s. Circles and lines interesting at different angels are common shapes in letters. Young child who is able to distinguish between shapes is better equipped to notice the differences in shapes of letters. This helps not only with reading but also with writing. The lines and shapes might initially look haywire, but they will eventually turn into recognizable letters. Like letters, number come from the combination of different lines. A strong understanding of shapes can help child better recognize the numbers and how they look. Number recognition is an early math skill which need before they can move on to more advanced math skills. The shapes themselves fall under the geometry standards of math.We also can use shapes to learn and understand our daily necessities, food, building, we can't get away from shapes. Learn shapes is necessary in early child development.

----------Shapes and understanding

At this "visualization" level, kids’ focus is on the overall appearance of the shape, with little or no attention to the 'properties' of the shape. A square is a square because it matches with the “square prototype”. So, to the kid’s mind, a square once it has been rotated at a 45-degree angle will not be a square anymore. It may become a diamond, or an unrecognizable shape. For kids in this level, the shapes can be changed by rotation or rearrangement. So, the goal at this level is to explore how shapes are alike and different and to use these ideas to create categories of shapes, like squares, triangles, circles, cylinders, etc. The kids may start by grouping a triangle and a square together (they both have corners). But with more experience, they will start recognizing the differences between the more pointy corners of a triangle and the right angle corners of the square.  

Kids at this level gain most experience by evaluating common shapes and learning interesting features that they see in the shapes. They can later compare two shapes and learn features in the shapes that are alike and that are different. A kid at a better stage of this level should be able to sort multiple shapes based on a feature, and should start noticing some traditional geometric properties.

-----------Animation and shapes transition

As above, we talk about the shapes and the properties of the shapes. To our kids, when a shape has been rotated at a *degree angle will not be a same shape anymore. To help them understand the categories of shapes and to develop kids creative thinking skill about shape rotating, I would like to use animation to explore how shapes are transform.

Square. Squares can occur in different ways. It can be a box, TV, tofu, windows, diamond, and so on. When a square transform from one angle to another degree, we think it become other thing. Kids can learning shape and it's transition from the transforming.

Color

same as my color studies.

Movement
Shapes and it's form with relate applicate.

week 6

animation - adv vs dis

Use animation to help people learning animation looks complex and not really 'necessary'. I am thinking in a different way, which the animation can do and also helpful. I am thinking about children, young child likes animation, they think animation are fun and interesting. In most research and report has been shown that animation can motivate student and improve creative thinking skill and more. In this website: http://home.tiscali.nl/schopmanlanden.nl/Papers/AnimationPaper.html, they talk about some advantage and disadvantage of the animation technology in education and training.

Some teachers are dislike the use of animation in the classroom – lots love it but sometimes people feel it can be a time-consuming waste of precious classroom hours, with students spending a long time perfecting something that they don’t believe has huge educational value. In fact, there are fantastic concrete reasons to take advantage of the range of animation tools for use in a teaching environment.

Advantages:   1 - Gets and generally keeps peoples' interest for the duration of the animation.  2 - Teaches using visual aids, a very strong proven way of learning.  3 - You may think this is funny, but it is serious: It gives animators work and helps them learn some science.  4 - Helps to explain and illustrate more complex concepts.

Disadvantages:   1 - Some people think animations are dumb or for kids and won't pay attention and learn anything.  2 - Costs money over traditional teaching methods and requires specialized resources (animators and writers).  3 - Ineffective teaching/learning tool for complex interelated concepts due to its inherent simplicity.  4 - Can give a false sense of safety as related to science that requires important attention to safety, such as chemistry experiments, electricity and the nuclear fields. Animations are not good for teaching safety in science.

Self-expression
For many students, self-expression can be a huge challenge, and traditional methods of art such as drawing and painting, it enjoyable, but may feel difficult for those who don’t necessarily have a huge amount of natural artistic talent. But the beauty of animation is that ready-made characters can be placed into pre-drawn environments. Sites like the Zimmer Twins are an excellent example of this perfect balance between pre-prepared materials and lots of free creative choices. Better still, it has a special website designed specifically for use in schools, with class management tools built in for teachers. 

Creative thinking and technology
When selecting the tools for such affective learning it is important to understand that today’s students are very different from even. These students have grown up with technology & live in a world in which digital technology is part of the texture of their daily lives. They have never known a world without technology. Technology is their native language and they expect to use technology in school. These Kids need digital tools which support creative expression.

LEGO Movie

A most popular animation movie. Kids thoroughly enjoyed it ( they parent do too =P). It’s imaginative, high-energy, and exciting. My flatmate, who is 26 years old, she love LEGO and spend 500+ nzd every year to buy them. Whatever who you are, whatever where you from, people love lego and the creative idea behind this product (such as this movie).
Sound stray from the point...

Therefore, we understand that animation can motivate people and in some way to help them learning things with fun.

More real disadvantage:

Time Consuming
Animators draw individual frames for each scene. The large numbers of drawings and the photography time required in completing a production consumes schedules and can result in delays. Reliance of a large crew of animators makes it difficult to speed up production as each animator works at a different speed. Traditional animation takes more time compared to computer animation, which uses animation software to speed up the process.

Correcting mistakes
A mistake in traditional animation requires you to repeat the whole drawing instead of deleting and correcting a mistake. The repetition of work can become tiresome and time consuming. Artistic corrections for quality animations are costly, as they demand repetition of an entire task. Repetition of tasks to correct mistakes involves a large crew incurring the production more costs.

Costs
Traditional animation requires a numbers of tools and equipment per production. They include drawing tools, tracing tools, and photographic equipment. It also requires a large crew to draw the characters, draw backgrounds and shoot photos of the final images.
http://www.ehow.com/info_8381459_disadvantages-traditional-animation.html

In order to avoid the above problems, my work will be reduction in time by change / mix different production methods; use most simple way to reduce production costs; animated content to be concise, avoid 'long time' caused the visual fatigue or distraction, so that the entire animation be focus on one story; focus on a range of people.

“Forest Explore” short animation practice

Forest Explore is a short animation, only a few seconds, is a practice of 'depth'.
As shown above, you can see this animation is composed of three layers, I used dark brown for front layer, light brown for middle, white for the back one. I use these three color because in the forest, during the night or early bird everywhere are dark and hard to see the things, however, the moonlight through the gaps between the branches let we can only see the bright shadow at a distance, and close up there is no light and appear very dark.
In this work, three layers applied with different speed in order to create a 'real world' version, I try to show the audience a kind of 'follow' or 'running' in the forest. In my research, some animation did similar thing, such as:


During this animation, a creature walk in the forest, we can see that background used light/white color to draw trees, and closer part use dark/black color, like shadow. When the creature walking in the forest, background(white trees) moving slower than the front in order to show the distance between the creature and the fathomless forest, it simulate a huge environmental settings (2.5D not 3D).
Above words talk about the color and speed, now I would like to talk about the direction of movement. You might see that creature animation used normal physics principal. When he walked to the right, tree moving to the left(both front and behind), it is always moving in the opposite direction. I did different way,why? My practice name is 'Forest Explore', I have to show the meaning of Explore in my work, is it? what is explore? To search into or travel in for the purpose of discovery: exploring outer space.
Yes, have to travel, walk into a place to finding something, into the forest. When we walk into a place, go ahead we will find, on both sides of the scenery will move back, we go into deeper. So, I tried to make the top two layers moving from one side to another side, (not from middle of screen to the end-side), in order to simulate a 'into' movement. But, it is not fully successful, first, move to fast, audience doesn't understand why the layer moving in this direction; second, subvert the normal cognitive model, usually on both sides of the landscape we see are slowly moving backwards instead of moving from one side to the other side; thirdly, not select right color in this work ( I don't know why, but I just think I should take other colors, maybe black black and white? light/dark brown not make sense....)

Research - Question - More

Animation and Learning

How to use animation to teaching animation? How to use animation to show animating works? Is that better than simple text and illustrations?

Show the process (work-flow) = Learning the process??

paper 1:
- Margaret Chan, -John Black

In that paper, it talk about comparing the effectiveness of text and static illustration with animation and narration to enhance learning has been inconclusive. The failure to ascertain the benefits of animation in learning may relate to the way it is constructed, perceived, and conceptualized.

Through this paper, I try to find out the failure of use animation in learning, and figure out new ideas add into it to improve animation in learning in order to decrease that failures.

Educational potentials and affective appeal of animation, animation refers to "any application which generates a series of frames, so that each frame appears as an alteration of the previous one, and where the sequence of frames is determined by the designer or the user". The advantage of this presentation format over text and static visuals is its ability to represent change in time and to preset information about change over time. We learn motion by learning through the movement.

Is it possible to say that I can use animation to show how animation work if I show the work-flow? To understand how animation work, it's like to see how the illusion represent a movement in front of eyes. We see a moving stuff by using our brain to record previous image and relate to the current one. for example:

The traditional animation use the illusion (frame by frame) to animate a story, this time why we not go with backward? use animation to show how the illusion been created?

Problems with animation

Animation use motion to depict motion and temporal changes, it may be too complex or fast to be perceived accurately. Sweller and colleagues (1996) pointed out that if a high level of interactivity among the entities is depicted in instructional materials, the leaners' working memory may be overloaded; consequently, they may have difficulty perceiving and understanding the learning content. Should I keep the animation simple and diversification? Make sure that audiences' brain not overloaded, but learn from simple interactivity work. Is that means use the format of animation need to be easy to understand and the content has to be interactive but not complex?

Other problem is learners' prior domain-specific knowledge may influence the effectiveness of animation in comprehension and learning. 

Paper say, the limitation of animation in promoting effective learning may relate not only to how animation is perceived and conceptualized, but also to how it is constructed. To develop effective animation that promotes learning, we need to consider individuals' internal visualization processes and their mental model development. ( the perceptual and cognitive demands that animation may impose on them, especially novices.) in order to understand these problem, I have to work on the visualization processes and mental development research, to see how animation help/let's people to concentrate on one thing. Also, some learners may need to perceive and understand the visible as well as the ''hidden'' functional relationships among components within complex systems. In my project, learning animation by using animation, it is very important to show the 'animating process' to people who don't understand the work-flow, because the ''hidden''(above) part as same as the animation process which we never know how illusion really work in animation.

// Format, support animation //...

paper 2:

- Lirong Xiao

This paper say the use animation in learning has a key point which is how to demonstrate the particular characteristics of individual animations or how to organize the teaching content in a specific lesson.