STOP MOTION - CHARACTER WALK AND CHANGE OF EMOTION

In our final dedicated stop motion session, we looked at making a character walk and changing their emotion halfway through their walk.

Firstly, we looked briefly into industry research. We were shown a few good websites for news on the animation industry, including Skwigly and It's Nice That. We were also given some advice on how to use social media to our advantage. Most, if not all students on the course have some kind of art / animation social media account, and were advised to use them to follow animation studios, and the people working within them to get a more insider look.

We also had a look at another Academy "Credited As" video, this time for Georgina Haynes, the Head of Puppetry on Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings.

(Hayes talks about how she got into the industry, and what her role entails - credit: The Academy)

From there, we were sent in our groups to start animating. I was in a group with Jenny and Leon, both of which I know I work well with! We were, like last time, assigned to work in the Animation Production studio, and we used this storyboard:

We used the wire armatures again, and I made sure to be extra cautious with the camera after last time. We had lightly assigned roles throughout this animation; Jenny was mostly in charge of capturing the frames, where Leon and I were mainly animating the puppet. I say the roles were lightly assigned because we didn't outright declare who was doing what, but that was what roles were the majority of the time. We had swap arounds at points, but they were for shorter periods of time.

We did some live action references for the beginning half of the animation. We weren't quite sure what would be the right way to make the happy part of the walk look, so I was recorded performing the action. We had to do it twice, because halfway through the first one I started laughing and ruined the take.

One useful thing about working in a group was having everyone contributing ideas that we wouldn't have thought of individually. An example of this within this production is with how the change of emotion is expressed when walking away. Jenny suggested that instead of having the puppet just shuffle off, he should kneel down and put his head in his hands. Leon then built on top of that by suggesting that when the head was cupped in the hands, the puppet could shake their head and seem like they're crying.

We didn't run into any issues with animation, and everything went smoothly! It was mostly due to the people I was working with, they were really helpful and it couldn't have been done without them! 

There was one issue later on; exporting. When I exported the video, I got home to find the video file had an issue with it. The top 60% of the shot was darkened, something that wasn't in the actual animation. I didn't want to go back the next day and reexport it, so I tried to fix it myself. I brought the file into Premiere Pro and messed about with it until I managed to get the effects to work on the video, leaving me with a fixed file!

After all that, this is what the final animation looks like!

And that concludes the final stop motion task! Overall, I'd say this was the best project for me personally. I think it helped me become a little bit more friendly with stop motion, definitely in a better place with it than I was a few weeks ago. I don't think I'll be doing it for the Mystery Box project though; while I have lightened up to the method, I think it was mostly out of the aspects of working as a part of a team. The Mystery Box is a solo outing, and I think that stop motion would be the wrong choice for me. But overall, stop motion has been an interesting experience if anything!