Stop-motion animation #1

Well after being introduced to the wonderful world of stop motion animation, this has got me thinking about some little bits that I can make individually. Normally you'd at least work in a partnership - one acting, being the focus of the piece, whilst the other takes all the individual frames. With a play around on my own though, I've managed to make something from my rough attempt at stop-motion creativity.

Being brutally honest, it is no way of standard, it isn't even amateur. I see this as just a tester, a first go at dipping my toe in the water of stop motion animation. So bear this in mind!

It was after seeing the example of the Guinness advert in my seminar that I had the idea to play around with fingers for this piece. I added a few props, drew a few doodles and generally just tried different things to see how they turn out. One thing I noticed was that this is a great potential for magic tricks - you control exactly what can be seen, defy physics and logic, so any poorly skilled magic men amongst us are immediately in the posession of highly effective trikery skills!

What I enjoyed about this is that it can all be done in a relatively straight forward manner. You don't need to spend hours adding technical detail. By having a simple story with relatively simple action, means it has quite an effective and enjoyable feel - nothing over the top or complicated. Its best when seeing it all as one piece, rather than the hours spent moving in tiny incremental steps, where it's difficult to relate to and appreciate what you're actually producing. Even at this stage of posting I'd forgotten about the use of any sound. Going back and adding some has now made a difference. It adds an element of life, and a more entertaining feel to it, all round.

Problems came in the form of the angle of the camera and trying to judge if it keeps the white background in shot and not anything additional! Lighting also proved a problem - for whatever reason the flash would come on intermittently, and so after a while I just resolved this by turning it off completely. Apologies for the watermark hovering in the background, its one of the cons of sampling free user software - better that than nothing I suppose!

Already I am starting to learn the do's and don'ts (do things in tiny steps, don't do big jumps, even if frustrating and time consuming, its worth it in the end. don't shake the camera all over the place, it really tells when watching ensemble) It is with these such pointers that I can develop further to make even better sharp, witty animation sketches in the future.

One thing I definitely need to work out is to get a 'victim' of my own, a puppet to perform the tricks -then I'll be able to take the snaps etc and not need to mess around with a one man show, which is very limited and has low quality results.

Over and out...
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