Stop-Motion

[IINSPIRATION/IDEAS]

After brainstorming and looking at inspirational videos we as a group decided that our final idea was to create a sandwich and a cup of tea. The storyboard starts with showing an extreme close-up of a clock to show its lunch time followed by a character who is hungry. 
He/she decides to make a sandwich and a cup of tea. We follow him/her through the course of making a sandwich and a cup of tea, using cut scenes and different materials. 

Storyboard of 'The lunch hour'

We decided on some of the materials to use, so me and Memoona went shopping, while the others looked for some of the things around the university. A lot of the things we got were different objects which had similar aesthetics to represent various different foods and materials.

 Finished strips of bacon in each stage of cooking

Maltesers used as diffusing tea

Other materials bought

We planned on using replacement animation throughout, hence why we had three different forms of the bacon, i.e. raw, cooked, and well done.
Also the cricket ball was to act as the tomato, and we used plasticine to show the slices being cut off.

[TESTS]

   

After we had gathered all the materials we had made some tests in preparation for the final. This helped us decide on what to do and what not to do.

When we started our final we looked at the set and checked different lighting to portray the mood we want.

We used this for our final lighting scenes after experimenting with different lighting and hues, we felt it was slightly on the cold side, which was what we wanted.

To add a bit of humor to the video we decided to use a cuddly toy cow to show that it is providing us with milk. We used emotion on the cow by adding sound effects and using replacement animation on the googley-eyes by making them bigger.

[SOUND EFFECTS & EDITING]


All of the sound effects were put in by Andy Mo.
For the sound effects we wanted something relaxing and piano based. We decided to use Left Bank Two's 'Little Big Planet' tune, which worked out effectively. We used various other sound effects which we had to choose carefully in order to set the mood and tell the story. 

[FINAL]

The final video was a success and was what we planned it out to be. We finished the editing in good time and added the credits too. 

The only problems we encountered were materials not working to our expectations, so we had to change some of the materials such as the maltesers which were too big, we overcome this problem by using crumbled chocolate buttons instead. We also improved the video as we went along by adding new things which we thought would work well, like the spinning biscuit to represent the momentum of the tea after its been spun.

As a group we did very well, everybody put in their input to make this a successful stop-motion video. We used pixillation and replacement animation in this video, and found it to work quite effectively.

The principles of animation do change when working with stop motion and live objects, i.e. you cannot use the principle straight ahead action or pose to pose, as that refers to drawing. The principles we used were:

* Staging

* Anticipation

* Slow in and slow out

* Arcs

* Exaggeration