Stop Motion Class Project Summary (The Notebook)

Hello! I am working on a group project in my animation class. We created a stop motion animation! It's a pretty neat project and stop motion is my favorite kind of animation! We set up storyboards, an animatic and shots of still and live action footage! It's about three objects (a highlighter, notepad, and stapler) that are transported to a doodle world and have to try and find a way out. Along the way in the doodle world, they meet different sketches. They seem pretty neat, until scribbles start attacking them. That is the turning point in which they have to find a way out of the dangerous world. At first, we discussed our own ideas for what we could do with the project. We finally ended up on this idea on a group agreement.

During Pre-Production, we got to work and began drawing storyboards, discussing shots, and where the camera will be angled. We shot some rough footage for what our project is going to be like.

For Production, we mixed stop motion, live action, and hand drawn animation for this project. We had a notebook, a highlighter, notepad, and a mini stapler. We then began to record their movements frame by frame with the camera for stop motion. We used video for live action scenes and Photoshop and After Effects to animate the doodle world. Shooting was a bit of a challenge. We had to pay TONS of attention to detail. For example, we had to make sure the lighting was good during every shot. And when we came back to shoot the next day, we had to make sure the objects were in the exact same position the day before. We had to get all the right camera angles from our storyboards and we could not move the camera when we were shooting our shots. I would say it was a bit of a pain to shoot sometimes, but that is the challenge of animation. During this time, we had a bit of a rough time with time crunches, an inconsistent stop motion environment, and some trouble finding sound effects.

During Post Production, we imported our frames into After Effects to begin editing our shots. Once all the shots were completed, we set them into one composition. We began to add sound and visual effects for the final touches. Some of the effects we used were crumbling text, overlay, and getting the lighting to be somewhat similar to all our shots.

I learned a lot from this project. I learned how to correctly use a camera (stop motion-wise) and collaborating with my team as to what shots we can take, where to position the camera, and how many shots we need to take to get however many seconds of film. (15 frames=1 second, for example.) I also learned how to edit a film in After Effects and color correct lighting.

As to what I would do differently, I would have picked a more bright room to film in. Sometimes the room was so dark there were tons of shadows that we could not control. For example, when we filmed the introduction of the notepad scene, the lighting was way too dark. The shadows were interfering with the shot. We tried to make it a bit brighter in After Effects, but it was still too dark. The lighting and shadows were sometimes beyond our control.

I don't think I would do anything the same with this project. I am going to improve on what I can do to create a better stop motion. I will learn from my mistakes and see what I can do differently.

When I create a new project, I will definitely make sure I have the right lighting, a good shot, and choose a better environment to work with. I thought the room we shot in was a fine choice, but as we got further into working, we came to the realization that shadows (people walking around in the room that would interfere with the shot, for example) would be a bit hard to avoid. Naturally, we found new and improved ways to shoot that would not interfere with our environment.

In conclusion, it was a fun project, but a bit of a challenge. But that's what animation is all about, right? Filming with cameras, moving our characters a tiny bit at a time, and filming within the classroom was a new and fun experience as to what you can do with stop motion. There were a few bumps along the way, but it was so much fun to challenge ourselves. My group and I (with the exception of one person) were very committed to this project. This project was truly a work of art.

Here is the rough footage and animatic for our concept and ideas!

Here are the storyboards!

Page 1 of storyboards

Page 2 of storyboards

Page 3 of storyboards

Here are some stills!

Here is the first draft of our video! Blogger would not let me upload since the file was too big.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoCEQ0PZCC0

EDIT- We are now finished with our project! It's not perfect movie quality stop motion, but I loved how it turned out! We worked hard on this project and it was a lot of fun! Enjoy the final render! Since Blogger could not let me upload the final product because 100 MB was too big, here is the YouTube link. After many spots we had to clean up after our critique in the class, here is our final animation complete with sound effects and correct lighting!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFwxGU_E_YE&feature=youtu.be

Click to see my group's blogs!
John Pace's Blog
Makella Child's Blog
Emma Johnson's Blog
Brock Townsend's Blog
Nathan Goldberg's Blog