STOP MOTION - INTRODUCTION

Today we started our 3 week Stop Motion unit!

We started out by looking at this project's outline, which includes:

1. Ball Bounce
2. Character lifting a Box
3. Walk Cycle / Change of Emotion

For this first week, we started with the ball bounce. We were advised to consider several factors, including where squash and stretch could be applied and the timing / spacing. The only real requirement for the task was that the ball had to be on the spot, and make one full bounce.

But before we started, we looked at other stop motion animations, and the people who animated them; an example of which is Kevin Parry.

(Parry's showreel, showcasing shots from Kubo and the Two Strings - credit: Kevin Parry, Laika)

Parry works for Laika Animation, who made Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings. In his showreel, we see the various rigs and setups he used to animate characters, from smaller setups for the human characters, to more complex, greenscreen-required rigs for larger creatures.

We then moved onto the task. I was paired up with Rachael, someone who I already knew I worked well with. We had a simple rig to work with; a wooden block supporting a single wire, which had a Plasticine ball on the end of it. We created several iterations of the ball bounce animation, each time swapping roles between animating and capturing pictures, and making changes that made the animation look a little better each time.

(One of our first iterations; the timing wasn't working as well as we wanted, and we had issues with the camera and rig we were using.)

Our biggest change came with visualising our timings. In DragonFrame, the stop motion program we were using, it lets you draw references on the screen for different things using a pen tool. With this, we made a small reference of what our timings would look like, creating a long line upwards for the vertical high and low of the ball, and then small horizontal lines for where the top of the ball would be on each frame. We considered easing in and out when working out the timings, making it so the ball would speed up and slow down where necessary.

(A later iteration that worked much better; we were much happier with the timing and overall look of the animation)

Once we had an animation we were satisfied with, we tried experimenting with start points and timing a bit more. In my opinion, these didn't turn out as well as the finished animation, but it was interesting to see what more variation resulted in.

(Two of our later variations. Timing was changed to be slower, but ultimately didn't look as good as our 3rd original iteration.)

We had issues along the way when making these animations. The main one was the rig we were using. It wasn't ideal for the task we were doing for several reasons; the ball kept falling off, as well as being really difficult to mould when we wanted to add some squash and stretch in. The wire was not stable at all, it would wobble about after trying to put it into a new position, often just returning back to the pose it was in the previous frame. It kept coming out the wooden block, and it was strangely sharp. It wasn't necessarily dangerous, but it certainly could've been safer.

In the end, I'd say this session went... alright. I'm not the biggest fan of animating in stop motion, since it's a little bit too fiddly and requires a lot more patience to pull off effectively than I have. Admittedly, those feelings could be just from this one session; animating this particular task was frustrating, purely because the materials wouldn't work the way we wanted them to. But perhaps the next stop motion task can sway me a little bit.