Our Animations

Creating a Stop Motion Animation

In class we had to create our own stop motion animation about anything we wanted but it had to be creative. In my group we decided to do a stop motion animation on a whiteboard and use a whiteboard marker to create the characters and backgrounds. In our stop motion the story is about a cartoon character traveling the world and seeing stereotypical things in that country.  For example in France the eiffel tower would be there and he would be holding a baguette and wearing a beret. This is so the audience is aware of the counrty in which the scene is set and also to represent him travelling the world. This whole film is created using pictures, we had to move the charatcers and the background very slightly in order to devise the illusion of movement. We only had around 1 hour and a half to make our film however it gave us good experience in creating a stop motion animation film and gave us an idea into how long it takes and how much effort needs to be put in. From creating this film I learnt that it takes a very long time to produce a small amount of footage and if you wanted it even smoother it would take much longer. Likewise to the stop motion films that have been created such as Chicken Run that took 3 years to create and the nightmare before christmas. The film was inspired by the song Around the World by Daft Punk, we had to add this in when we had finished taking the pictures. We had a few problems when we shot our stop motion animatiodue to lighting problems. We shot our film over two days and the lighting looked different on the camera on the 2nd day therefore you could see the lighting change when it was put together. This went unoticed by the people viewing it because it was quite a minor mistake however I have learnt to keep the lighting controlled at all times during the production stage. We used final cut to edit our stop motion aniamtion which helped me to learn more about the program and the techniques to use.        

Surreal Stop Motion Animation 

    In a group of three we had to create a short film by using stop motion animation surrounded by the theme of surrealism. This is our film it is inspired by Jan Svankmajer who uses a very surreal type of stop motion animation. We used a mix of both film and stop motion animation in our short movie. By creating this film I learnt that you can be more experimental with stop motion animation and use different techniques to make the overall film look more creative. Unfortunately we were unable to add music onto the film because we didn't have time, however this has taught me that you need to be extremely organised in order to create a good stop motion animation. I think this film was quite effective for the brief because it was something very surreal that was quite original.  It was a good experience making the stop motion animation because I learnt that we needed to know exactly where we were going to film what time we were going to  film and to leave enough editing time. We didn't leave enough editing time for our film and therefore we had no time to add music and it could have been edited slightly better. This is all experience so we can get an understanding about how stop motion animation works and we can explore our ideas which helped develop our imagination. We had few difficulties filming our surreal piece however it was quite difficult to film the people going though the table. This was the scene that had to be shot the most because we couldn't get the right amount of camera shots to make it flow properly however in the end we managed to get the shot. I also learnt about different camera shots because they add variety into the film. For example when the girl is eaating the paper we show it from a range of different angles. To improve our film I think we could make the story slightly less confusing because it is quite hard to follow, this would be aimed at an older target audience rather than children because they may get confused.

Feedback: The techniques that you have used look very surreal however the plot is slightly confusing. The ideas are great and the flow of animation looks clear.

It is a clear representaion of the surreal genre however it would have been better if you added some music and more sound effects.