Stop Motion Animation

This is a cinematic process used to make static objects look as if they are moving. It is most commonly used in claymation like Wallace and Gromit. Lots of images are all taken after slight movement is made within the frame of the image and then placed on a time line with a specified duration of frames in a second. If this is used effectively it can make the impossible happen within the video.

However this can be very time consuming. For example the first Wallace and Gromit short film A Grand Day Out took 6 years to fully make.

In my group we discussed possible themes that we could explore. Since as I had already done some initial ideas I suggested linking it to Star Wars and use the 'force' to move things around in the frame. I think this would look very strange yet mystifying because the stop motion will make it look a little juddery yet its something that would never have been seen before by some people which makes it quite special. I think that this idea might be quite hard to produce because there will be flying and moving objects that will need to be controlled during the photo shoot. If there are flying object in the final video then we may have to throw things into the air and time the shutter perfectly multiple times to make it look smooth in the movie.

We then took out some equipment to try out some simple and basic techniques.

This blue section is where I was lifting my hand to signal the movement of the mug.














This purple area shows the mug moving across the frame into the palm of my hand.






















The green area is where where I lifted the mug up to my mouth to have a drink and put it back down on the table again.

















The rest of the images are where we tried to make my college lanyard move across the table and float up and over my head. However there is a couple of mistakes during this part.




This black area shows where we dropped the lanyard with the intention to reverse the order so that it looked like it was floating. However we forgot about this and made the initial movie without Changing the order it.


This red area is where the sun had gone behind a cloud and the camera wasn't ready to compensate for the change in lighting which has majorly effected the look of the movie.

The cloud had moved for the last three frames in the movie so there is a major change in exposure which makes it even worse.

The first 8 seconds of this movie look very effective because it is very smooth and flows well. However as soon as the frames where we dropped the lanyard came up it all went wrong. All the images in this movie lasted for 2 frames of the the 25f/s. We obviously took enough images for the first part however no where near enough for the lanyard section of the movie. This shows that in this part of the movie the images need to last for more frames and I need to consider the positioning of the frames. This will make the movie a lot smoother because each frame will flow onto the next and they wont judder around the screen into a blur.

I am going to edit all of the images in the red section and remake the movie with all the frames considered for the order in which I place them on the time line.

Remake

 I started off by uploading the frames I needed at the time in order to not get confused by which frames were where in the movie. By changing the duration of each frame before you put them on the time line means that you won't have to deal with moving them across when gaps are made. The frames dont move when the duration is changed on the time line so they leave gaps inbetween them.

 This screen shot shows how I have nested the movie into specific sections of movement. This keeps it easy to keep track of each section and allows me to move sections around easily if I need to.

 Over the time line there is a line thats half green and half red. The red shows that Premier Pro may struggle to play all the frames seemlessly however sometime this will not effect it's playback quality. It is only a precaution.

I have switched over to Photoshop so that I could edit the dark images so that it replicates the exposure of the originals.

Here I have finished the frames and nested all the sections.

I have added the audio and I am cutting it down to fit the length of the film.

When exporting the video you need to change the format to H.264 and then the preset to YouTube HD 1080p 25. This is what a lot of computer systems run at with videos.

Click on sequence 01 and you can change the name of the file.

It will then give you the expected completion time and save it to the selected destination.

This is a lot smoother and I have changed the duration of individual frames to give different effects. For example lifting my hand in the first second was at 2 frames and then the cup moving started at 5 frames and increased to 2 frames after going through 4 and 3 frames. this made it seem like the model was struggling at first and quickly gained his strength.