Stop Motion

Testing different stop motion techniques

Before actually planning the stop motion project that I was going to produce, I had a chance to try out some of the mediums used for stop motion. I was able to experiment with the plasticine and even got a chance to observe and participate in some pixelation.

I was able to learn a lot from these sessions (e.g. under bright light, plasticine tends to melt a little bit so might not be the best for long sessions and pixelation can be a lot of work depending on what is wanted.)

Inspirations

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

The first examples of stop motion that I looked at for inspiration were a collection of claymation shorts that I remembered watching when I was younger. These had entertained quite a lot from what I remember and so were inspiring when planning my own stop motion video.

http://www.stopmotionanimation.com/video/the-harlequin-s-trick-a-stop-motion-short

However, because I didn't want to just copy something else, I decided I might go with using an armature and thought that looking at other stop motion videos with armatures would give me an idea of their limitations and how it is best to use them.

Planning

After researching other videos, I decided it was time to start to actually plan my stop motion project. This started with me and my partner, Luke, creating our own mind maps to decide what we each wanted to do. Originally I thought about using plasticine as it is easy to manipulate but we decided that an armature would be more efficient. He created a production schedule and I drew up a rough storyboard.

We then had to pitch our story idea to our tutor. We messed around with a few ideas, bouncing them off each other and finally picked one that we thought might work.

However, upon pitching it, it seemed that it might be a bit over ambitious so we had to change our story to something a little simpler. We spent the next couple of days coming up with something new and eventually came to our 3 doors idea.

We pitched this idea and were given the go ahead to create our set for the film.

Building the set

Before we had started,we had an idea for what we wanted to create. All we needed was the materials. We were lucky enough to find a large, solid, thick piece of cardboard. This would serve as a base to the rest of the set.

Next, we found another large (but not quite as solid) piece of cardboard to serve as the back of the set (and the doors). We measured and cut out 3 identical rectangles into the less solid piece, leaving one side uncut so that it would act as a hinge for our makeshift doors. We measured them according to rough estimates of the armature's size. 

We cut out 3 smaller triangular pieces of card and super glued those to the other 2 pieces so that the larger pieces could be more easily glued together at a 90º angle to each other.

Production

After having built the set and completed testing, we had to book the room to continue with the actual shoot. We had to wait some time until the room was available to us but once it was, we wasted no time and were able to complete the recording within 2 days. We had taken turns moving the model and taking the shots. 

After taking  a few shots, we decided to check the lighting on them. It turned out that the images were a little too dark so we had to change some settings on the camera and adjust the lights shining on the set. However, once this was done, we were ready and confident for the rest of the shoot which turned out to be almost as good as expected.

Post Production

 

We had completed filming so next was editing. After we had added sound and converted the images into a video file, we were ready for some feedback so we showed our film to the class. We got quite helpful feedback and with it we were able to record some more useful footage and edit the images down to a more appropriate ratio (16:9). We were more confident about the film now and were ready for final hand-ins.