Monday 16th October

So our first problem on the afternoon of animating was that we hadn’t anticipated how long it would take to set up. While in the end it didn’t inhibit us too much, it’s useful to know for future projects that this can happen, and plan for more time needed at the start. Another thing I would do differently next time is maybe make the set, with the cardboard/tissue paper, beforehand, such as on the Friday. Even if it was just a rough estimate, it might have helped. But then again, part of what took so long with the setting up was getting the camera and the light right, which we couldn’t have done before our allotted time in the stop motion room. Going forward with future stop motion projects, however, I think I would plan out a time just for that phase of things, so I don’t feel rushed to get on with the animation the way we did today.

We also had a small communication problem with one member of the group, who had envisioned her 5-second sequence. as a more 2-dimenstional sequence that wasn’t possible with the setup we had planned for the rest of us. Adapting it took a bit of time, which also delayed the overall process, but she did so effectively. However, creating a version of the set on Friday before we got into the studio would have also probably avoided this problem, as we would have been able to communicate better how the whole piece was going to work.

I’m mostly very pleased with my sequence. It took a bit of time for me to sync it up with the sound, and it was a bit awkward having to ask the person capturing the frames to keep deleting them and redo them. This is an area where I often find it easier to work by myself than with others, when I have a very clear idea of what I’m trying to achieve and I know it would go smoother if I could do things myself instead of having to translate it to other people. However, I’m hoping with time this will get easier and I’ll be more confident in explaining what’s in my head.

Having someone else capturing the frames also made me feel like I had to work quickly, particularly since the whole thing was taking longer than we expected. Because of that, my green ‘log’ bobbing up and down on the lefthand side looks a bit odd, because I should have extended that for more than a couple of frames. If I’d had more time, or felt less pressure to get it done, I would have watched that back and redone it, or added on more frames before I moved on to the next bit.

Wednesday 11th – Friday 13th October 2023

For our group project, we chose the approach of dividing the sound into 4 sections of about 5 seconds, and then planning our own 5 seconds of animation separately. While it was clear that this will lead to a somewhat incohesive piece with a variety of different styles, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. The image we’re creating is of a sort of pond that has various things coming in and out of it, and I think it works to have all those things look and feel different from each other. It creates a kind of magical, fantasy feel to the piece, which is fun to do in stop motion, because you make things happen with real objects that you can’t in live action.

My 5-second section is not dissimilar to what I did on Monday, with a shape going in and out of the water, but this time it’s 3-dimensional. I didn’t intend for that to happen at the start, but it’s always interesting to build on previous ideas and see where else you can take them.

Today we used replacement animation to make paper transform from one shape to another. I was going from a square to a circle and I wanted to be a little ambitious with it, making the shape turn into something else before it became a circle. I decided to have the square sink into the table and turn into an ocean wave before disappearing again and rising up as a circle.

It took me a bit of time to figure out the anatomy of wave, and in hindsight I could have used a reference instead of judging it by eye. But I think I still managed to create the illusion I was trying to, mostly. One thing I’d tried to convey was that the square, once it has disappeared beneath the surface, ‘swims’ along a bit, unseen, before emerging again as a wave. It didn’t quite look right though, so the tutor recommended using an eye-trace next time. So if I were to do it again, I’d have maybe a tiny dot of paper moving across the surface of the table to indicate the movement underneath, as if the square hasn’t totally submerged.

I think next time I would also plan out my frames a bit more before cutting them out, to have an idea of how many I’ll need. That would facilitate for more precise changes in speed as well, because it would be easier to add or take away frames between keyframes at the planning stage rather than the cutting out and animation stages.