Project 10 - Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion Animation - CLICK HERE

Our tenth project was to create a stop motion animation, the goal of the project was to create a set, along with moving characters. We were also given the brief of the 'girl meets boy' scenario, which the plot must revolve around. My first thought about this project was that it would be similar to creating the pixilation animation. But after beginning to design a character in the lecture, I realised this project would be more complex to create, but also has the potential to create a nice piece of animation that expresses the plot well.

To improve our historical understanding of this technique, we watched a collection of old clay animations, I also watched other examples, for example Gumbasia and Creature Comforts to gain a further understanding about the visual advantages and disadvantages of this technique.

Plot wise I needed to create a plot that fulfilled the brief, but I did not want to create a typical girl finds boy cheesy story. After seeing the stop motion animation shown in the lecture of the love triangle I decided I would create a set involving an 'exotic dancers club', and uncommon setting for a traditional 'girl meets boy' and create an interesting animation. I was inspired to do this after watching an episode of the US TV series 'Dexter' in which one of the main characters falls in love with a dancer, but make it more lighthearted and positive, a similar atmosphere felt at the beginning of this. Overall I am happy with plot I created. It fills the brief, while at the same time a plot that will keep the audience interested ( Who doesn't like a good ol' fashioned dance performance) and entertained. I also believe the use of music helps the audience understand the story and what I am trying to express in my animation. It was also the first time I experimented with the audio volumes to make the animation more realistic (In the animation the music is louder after the character goes into the club). I did mull over the thought of having the characters and audience speak and be given some dialogue. But after realising I sound like a welsh hillbilly in voice recordings, and 15 minute search for appropriate soundbites online, it was to impossible to find the dialogue I wanted unless I would cut lines out of a film or tv clip, and then inserting them as audio files into my animation on movie maker. I would have liked to have them speak, but I still think the animation works well with just the songs I picked.

Process wise it was fairly straight forward to create. The most time consuming part was designing and creating the set and characters. I created the characters out of clay and wire I received from the school. From the amount of clay and wire I had I knew it would not be enough for more than 2 characters, a fact I would have to take into consideration when creating a story.I created the set out of spare materials in my room. I used an old moving box, with 2 sides cut off, as the walls and floor, and glued normal printing & writing paper. I also used an empty cardboard box to create the stage and entrance, then used water colours to paint it all. I used movie maker version 6 & 7 for this project, as version 6 doesn't crash as much when putting the frames together, and version 7 is better for editing and inserting audio files. I used 2 boxes for my camera stand as I still cannot afford a new one, which wasnt too much of a disadvantage, but I wont argue that this cheap alternative caused the camera to move at some points during the video. Another Problem I discovered after putting the video together was that my thumb is visible in around 3-4 frames of the video, I did consider editing these frames out, but I felt they were too important, and I could not set up everything in the exact same way to re shoot the frames.

I am happy with the final outcome of this project. The animation I created was 28 seconds long, over double the duration of my previous works, which is long enough to effectively use audio and have a more complex story. I'm also pleased with the camera movements and different angles I shot from. This project also gave me the chance to work on and develop my set designing/creating, which I feel more confident in doing now.