Unit 32 the boring bit

Before I start I may as well say that I want a distinction for the practical, and hope that the one who reads this will grade my work with the knowledge that I did my best, so give me a distinction, I just know it will make my sick mother proud.

For this unit I was put into a team and asked to create a stop motion animation, and after lots of thought and conflict our team decided to use Claymation for this project, the reason being was because of researching beforehand we were able to determine that by using Claymation we could appeal to a bigger audience.

During this project I came across countless problems, both as a team and individually, the main one being that the modelling clay used for the production would harden and become useless after a few hours. Forcing us to make a new character for each session, this was difficult but not only because of the time wasted but also because it was hard to make the model look exactly like the last one. So to overcome this problem I decide to just re-use the old hardened model, this meant I couldn't move the character how I would of liked too, and ended up with a stiff movement, but I decided that this gave my stop motion its own character, and would encourage Mark to see this as intentional where the production may look amateurish.

Another problem that I personally faced was that my sound was longer that my production, it was difficult to get past this one as it meant changing the whole production because I couldn't mess around with the sound as it would have sounded distorted if I speeded up its rate. So I looped certain parts to fit the sound in and froze frames to insert voiceovers. This made my part of the productions 5 seconds longer than it needed to be but as they say more is better than less.

A problem that we all faced was that our production was supposed to be parts of a bigger production so the end of stop motion needed to be in sync with the start of another stop motion and vice versa. This meant we needed to know what the last person did before us so we could start from that point, so we decide as a team that we would make the production in a order so that the next person would know how to start there production. The only problem was that the longer a individual took meant that the next person would have lesser time to complete there part. Luckily we all met our team’s deadlines and that was not a problem.

Our team met all deadlines because everything was planned beforehand; not everything was done as planned but was accomplished nevertheless. Time was split between the planning, making the models and photographing them and finally putting everything together. When in the process of an individual’s production the other team members helped out with other aspects to speed up the estimated time of completion.

Above is our plan and it shows the order of the production and who is responsible for that part, it also tells us what we are doing and how to manage our time.

The inspiration for this production came from classical stop motion Claymation like Wallace and Grommet. Because of how long it remained popular and the appeal to both the old and young because of the vivid colours and shapes that come from using Claymation. This also inspired we too add comedy aspects to the production.

The team worked well together and because of earlier planning the work was equally shared and therefore each individual contributed what was expected of them, our team was already acquainted outside of this production so we were comfortable working together. We also had outside help to use for voice over’s, and to add to the comedy aspect there were different voice over’s in each production with different accents. There were some differences from my original plan as at first I was planning on using a different sound from Start Wars but because the audio was too long I ended up using different bits of audio mostly used in the American cartoon series Tom and Jerry and a speeded up version of William Tell to exaggerate the chase, because of the fast tempo. Another change was the eye popping scene where my character’s eyes would pop out of the head in surprise, but to achieve this affect I had to use nails to pop the eyes out, this was different from what I had originally intended to use the strength of the modelling clay,.. Big mistake.

I believed that I worked to the best of my potential, and was able to learn new skills during this project, like modelling with clay and photography. As I was already familiar with the software Adobe Flash CS3 which was used to put all images together and combine sound, but I was also able to use and learn from other software such as “Audacity” and “Sound Forge” which is the software I used to speed the rate of sound cut and paste audio together and export it as WAV and MP3 format.

To see if my production was a success I created an online questionnaire and placed it at the bottom of my blog, I left it for 14 days and a total of 110 people answered the questions.

This proves that my animation was a success as over 95% of people enjoyed the animation, even though it wasn't biased as the majority of the voters were male. If I were to do this project again; I would practice modelling to allow me to create better models that would animate better.

Okay well below is the actual animation up on Youtube for all to see, some of the quality was lost during the uploading process.

This is a processional example of claymation and apart from the obvious differences like quality, as mine remains grainy in places of in the animation and the example above is all smooth, this is because professional claymation is done with special modelling clay which doesn't set so modifications can be done whenever, also when a model is used at different times the light and colours tend to differ, and the profession example looks smooth all the way through this may be because lighting is controlled unlike my animation in which the lighting is all natural. Because my frame rate is set at 10fps the affect of persistence of vision and flicker fusion threshold is lost and the brain can notice the frame rate moving, but the professional example is at 24 fps which makes the animation a lot smoother. To summarise compared to a professional example mine doesn't hold a candle to it, but if it was that easy everyone would be doing it.

Peace out..

Did I mention my sick mother...