#stop motion project

[lunathejediknight]

I have a mold for female bodies now :]

I will make a male body one day just not today lol

Woo hoo 1 step closer to completing my stop motion puppet project!

[cm-wizart]

[cm-wizart]

[cm-wizart]

Stop motion - Puppet making !

[shrike-seventeen]

armature complete! here she is in all of her scrappy glory

[westar]

Stop Motion Project

[samanthaokeeffek00203399]

These are backgrounds I made for the stop motion project. I made them using images from the internet and then assembling them in photoshop.

[chrissytarrant-blog]

Stop Motion Evaluation

With this project I felt I gained an understanding of the wider range of skills, specialities and jobs available in the world of animation. A combination of set design, camera operation, editing, sound design and competent direction was required to see this project through to the end. The demands of stop motion workflows are in some ways more, and in some ways less, difficult to suit than that of 2D animation. Specifically the fact that I didn’t find myself having to redraw my protagonist every frame was helpful, or that colouring wasn’t an issue at all, but the fact that I could only work with essentially one layer and in frame by frame only did make it a very time consuming project. I feel I did a pretty good job at conveying a message or story without dialogue; using only the language visual of film, and had a great time experimenting with how to construct different miniatures and sets and what materials best suited any of this.

I think the strengths of this piece lye in the visuals and sound design, both of which I worked tirelessly on to build from the ground up. Apart from some background music, every single sound I had recorded and mixed myself, and the visuals, while simple, are exactly as I had imagined them and very consistent. No aspect of the film is the way it is without reason, from the position of the shadows, to the staging of the character, to the time on the clock and decoration on the walls. To elaborate, the decorations of birds and clouds are to show that despite his closed in existence, the protagonist yearns for the outside world and for the mess of nature, and the time on the clock (quarter to three) is in reference to the Elliot Smith song “2:45 AM”.

There is still plenty of room for improvement, however, and I found that many of the people who I asked about the film had found the storyline hard to follow or confusing. I’d like to have taken more time to make it obvious what had gone wrong, the tap not turning on, and the reason for the protagonist closing his eyes, to avoid seeing the trash. I also had to stretch out some shots to give them the emotional impact I wanted them to have, such as the head tilt at the end which is at a jarringly low frame rate compared to the rest of the short, because I needed to extend the time it was on screen to make sure it was obvious what it meant.

I’ve never attempted stop motion before and feel this was definitely a good first experience with the medium. I expect I’ll be doing more of this in the future, and I’m glad this project allowed me to experiment with a new way of animating that I hadn’t previously though suited me. It was great practice in learning how to tell a story without dialogue and in the importance of layered and detailed sound and set design.

If I could start this project again, I’d like to invest more time into taking images of my protagonist in still poses, so that when it came to editing, I’d have more chance to lengthen shots without it looking like the frame rate had dropped or the video frozen. However, on the whole, I think the learning experience is more worthwhile as it is.