StopTheMotion

As shown in the previous post, we have started working in clay. The plan for the semester was to spend the first half of the term experimenting with different types of animation to see what we like the best. I think clay has emerged as the winner.

You can tell right away from the sheer amount of improvement. We were able to put  alot more love into our clay animations than we did the others.

Another factor was our strange filming circumstances. We had reserved the photo lighting studio, but as we were setting up, a power surge struck one side of the room, with most of the outlets on it. So given the dusty state of the room, plus lacking light, we took the camera home and worked in my kitchen into the night.

This weekend, the plan is to go out and find toys to animate. Also, I am plotting making some tools in the wood shop where I work. Scrap wood and wing nuts, oh the joy.

Last Saturday, amidst the snow in Muncie, IN, Lexie and I ventured to the Arts and Journalism Building (heretofore knows as AJ) to shoot our animation. It was naive of us to think we could set up and shoot in a mere 4 hours, but that’s the only time we had in the studio. In the end, we have what you could call a product, but it’s far from meeting my personal goals/standards.

Initially, we were going to cut out all the pieces of paper by hand. After we finished the two heads however, we realized how awful this would be. Thankfully our art department has a laser cutter. I was able to use said laser cutter to make the smaller piece by drawing them out in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, and then tracing over those shapes in Illustrator. This added a professional flair to some of our cut-outs that would have otherwise been off-spec. (In retrospect, we should have made even more shapes before filming.

We decided on two sound clips from two different movies, and found an image on google explaining how the mouth looks when pronouncing different phonemes. We made sure we had most of the important shapes.

When it came down to shooting, our professor suggested we use Flipbook as our program, since the art department had already paid for it. I think the university got scammed. This program looks like freeware and operates about as well. It is not sophisticated at all. It was adequate for shooting the frames because it allowed us to link a camera with it via Firewire and adjust our shots while loading directly on our screen. This is where the bulk of our problems arose.

We spent the first of our 4 hours trying to get the camera to shoot mages that weren’t dark. The flat paper set was lit within an inch of it’s life. There was no reason we should have had this issue, as far as I know. Once we decided to fix the darkness in post, we came across another anomaly. The frames were shooting with different tints for no discernible reason.  To shorten the explanation, no we weren’t changing anything in between shots. Everything would be the same, but the frames would turn out more red or blue for some reason.

After we finally got everything shot, we packed up and went to edit. During filming, we opted to shoot a few frames of each large facial pose and to rearrange and copy/paste them in post to mouth synch. (I couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to do the using Flipbook’s interface.) This didn’t go over well in Flipbook. At this point I’m thinking the only thing this program is good for is drawing stills. For this it seems fine. But actual editing and shooting stop motion…no. We switched to Final Cut Pro and had the current copy rendered out in no time.

So far, I’m still committed to learning this as a form of animation, but I’m starting to suspect that the average student may not have time for such endeavors. There was so much more we should have done in preparation that we simply had no time to do. And the next assignment is probably going to be late due to weather. (We need to go out and buy toys, but it’s pretty impossible to go out driving. Curse Muncie and it’s disbelief in plows and salt…)

Hi all, my name is Sarah and I’ve created this Tumblr account so my friend Lexie and I have somewhere to chronicle our efforts this semester in an independant study of stop motion animation.

I can’t promise anything special, seeing as we have never tried this before, but I’ll try to take lots of pictures, and gather tutorials and tips as we go so the internet can learn as we learn.

I will introduce myself, and leave it up to my collegue as to what she wants people to know about her on  the intertubes.

As I’ve said, my name is Sarah, and I am a junior at Ball State University. I am working toward a BFA with a concentration in Electronic Animation. Also, I’m minoring in Japanese. Currently I work in the BSU Art Department’s Woodshop and also with the Digital Corps (another campus job). I wanted to take an independant study course so that I could round out my animation education more completely. The program at Ball State is still very new, so there isn’t much variety in course offerings.