Friday, May 9, 2008

Stop Motion - 252 painstakingly posed images

For our main assessment for "Create 2D Digital Animation" (Wednesday class with Jane), we are experimenting in, "learning by doing", stop motion animation.

The process has been to produce a short narrative idea to build into a film, produce some thumbnail drawings and develop a storyboard, design and build/sculpt characters, then animate.

A step that could have more time applied to it, that may have aided in planning, would have been to work on timimg out rough animation 'tests' in Monkey Jam. Either by doing these as paper and pencil line tests, or short sequences of stop motion.

The animation part is the most challenging, trying to work out how much to move and not move a puppet to get an idea of timing. Other challenges have been set design, achieving camera angles and framing of shots within the limitations of the set design, lighting and technical details with working with cameras and software.

This film was made using my digital camera (BenQ DC S30), the teacher's tripod, the course's 1Gb memory card in the camera. The set is a cut down, painted, polystyrene foam broccoli box. The poor lighting is ambient light plus a halogen desk lamp. The 'grass' is green fur. The dirt is from the banks of the Enoggera Creek in Brisbane (and what fine red dirt it is!).

Individual frames were captured on the digital camera. They were transfered to a computer. The frame images were adjusted in Photoshop using a "Batch action" command. The resultant smaller images were imported into Monkey Jam, viewed, and an AVI file exported with Microsoft Video 1 compression. The rough film was uploaded to Vimeo (further compressed) and the result is below (once it's ready on Vimeo).


Road Kill Wombat from Frank G on Vimeo.

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