Stop Motion Animation
Preproduction
Recently I have been tasked with the job of creating a stop motion animation, it started off with the people from my class coming up with our own ideas and then presenting those to the class. We were then assigned groups according to how similar our ideas were. The main premise of my group was to combine stop motion with animation, and also somehow integrating objects with goggly eyes. Eventually we settled on the concept of desk top objects coming to life and exploring a desk. They would then come across a notebook and upon walking on top of it, they would fall in. The objects would explore the universe inside of this notebook before coming across a few hostile drawings and then would promptly run out of the notebook and return to the real world.
We began by making a few story boards that outlined the basic concept of our story, as well as detailing some of the finer aspects that we wanted to include in our animation. Our story board mainly dealt with all of the shots we wanted and the key moments that we wanted to highlight throughout the animation. (Note: In the storyboard it is shown that the notebook falls down onto the objects, after some later though we decided for continuity it would be better if the objects simply fell into the notebook.)
After creating the storyboard we decided to create an extremely rough edit of how we wanted to the video to play out. We first took a few shots on an iPhone to help indicate the angles that we would use for actual filming as well as showing the actions we wanted the objects to preform when they were in the real world. Then one of my group members animated the story boards to they would follow in sequential order so we could clearly see how the animated parts going to play out.Preproduction took about a week and a half, coming up with the idea took about two days, story boarding took up only one day, and then creating the animatic required five days. I found that the steps we took during preproduction were extremely helpful during actual filming.
Animatic
Production
To complete the project we split up into two groups to complete both the animated part and the stop motion. Two people worked on the animation while me and two others shot the stop motion. The actually shooting of the stop motion took about a week and a half, we ended up finishing about one scene everyday. The most prevalent problems were having the shot being out of focus and thus having to reshoot the scene as well as the shadows in the background changing which affected how the scene looked when compiled. The only thing we need to do in post production was change some of the lighting in a couple of shots and after that we were able to put all of the shot we had together plus add the animations that had been done and we were finished.
Final Thoughts
One of the main ideas I learned during this time was how important preproduction is. If my group hadn't been assigned to make a rough edit of how we wanted our final product to turn out we would have ended up spending way more time on shots that we wouldn't have originally spent time planning out. Another huge thing I ended up taking away from this was to find an isolated shooting environment rather than one that could easily be affected. We shot our stop motion on a table inside of our classroom, but being forced to only shoot on the table severely limited the shots we could take, if we could have found a back room somewhere to film our options wouldn't have been as limited. And even though we did only film on top of the table people's shadows and light reflecting off of the table still made some of the shots kind of strange. Overall I believe the project was a success, even though there was some slight hiccups I believe the final project turned out nice. If I had to redo this project I would make sure outside forces would not affect the shooting, such as shadows and the ever changing classroom setting.
Sadly the video was too large of a file to upload directly to blogger so one of my group members was kind enough to upload it on youtube. You can view the final video here.
Group Members
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