The first work we went into doing when we returned from Winter Break was experimenting with stop motion, as that was what we would be doing for our puppets. For this, we worked on three different aspects of stop motion; a collage piece, 2D in the real world, and pixelation.
For the collage piece, I worked with one of my classmates to cut up the people from a magazine for the animation. We built a background out of the magazine as well, making it look like a stage that the magazine cutout people were dancing on. We experimented with cutting up and moving the different pieces of each cutout like puppets, which definitely informed us on speed and movement for later in the project.
For 2D in the real world, we had to make a moving gif/video of a 2D animation in a real world background. For this, I took a video of the rooftop and animated a flying witch going through the air. It was a very long and arduous process, especially when the character was still and the background video kept moving. But I managed to make it look smooth and make the video flow well enough.
The final part of the experiments was pixelation, and this experiment had me work with a group of others to make a stop motion film out of ourselves. It was hard, and we found that holding in the right poses for a long time tired us out after an hour of work, but we managed to get all of our work finished and went in for editing next. This wasn’t nearly as long, and was more finding the right sounds than anything. Our final submission was above satisfactory to us.