Evaluation of Stop Motion Animation Assignment

For this assignment, we were asked to create a stop motion animation using one of the methods we have learnt since September in our Education Futures class at university. Me and Sarah decided to work with each other on this project, as we live with each other and thought we could work well together. We decided it would be a good idea to use clay for our stop motion animation, at first I think we under-estimated the amount of time and patience necessary for this type of stop motion animation. However, when we got stuck into the project, we found ourselves quite enjoying the process of it. The clay we used for our project was very good, as it is designed to be quite moist, which meant that none of our models/characters could dry out, which could cause them to possibly break or crumble. The brand we used for the clay was called 'New Plast', the same clay used in our university, which was one of the main reasons we decided to use it.

To begin, here is a short clip of an example of clay animation to give you some idea of what it involves:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV4veTUMUs

The best way to describe what clay animation is, is that it involves making clay characters or figures then the difficult task of taking pictures with gradual movement from the figures, so when the photos are played back it looks like the figures are moving/animating. As you can tell, this takes a lot of patience and is extremely time consuming, but if it is done correctly it can have a great effect.

For our project, we were asked to base our animation on a current contemporary issue of our choice and had to be at least 2 minutes long. The issue we chose is based around homelessness, which has been and still is a huge problem in the United Kingdom and around the world. In 2014, 27,970 homeless applications were made in England and only 50% were accepted (Homeless Link, 2014). We aim to make it clear that people in this situation are not alone and help is always available around every corner, when you may least expect it. For the animation, it is set outside and involves a character on a park bench and the seasons changing. In order to make the set, we used two place mats to create the background, these were blue and green to represent the sky and the grass. The only problem with using these were that they were slightly too small, meaning the animation space was slightly limited and meant that the background could not fit in the camera shot. Here is a picture of the set, to give you an idea on how it looked:

The amount of props used for this animation is fairly low. The tree, the character and the bench are the only props that occur for the entire duration of the animation. The picture also shows the other props that come in and out of the animation, these include clouds, the sun, rain, snow, leaves and finally the second character that comes on who helps the homeless person. This character also has an umbrella, which is important for the story and displays his kind generosity.

As mentioned before, there will only be two characters in our animation; the homeless character and the second character who has come to help. We felt that this is all we really need and did not want to draw attention away from the main two important characters. The conflict the first character is having is that he is homeless and is extremely unhappy and lonely, the second character wants to help and wants to do a good deed. The conflict is resolved by the second character helping the first character, and showing that help is always there and how any gesture can be considered as helpful to a person in need.

In order to film our animation, we used a stop motion animation app on my iPhone 5. It is called Stop Motion Studio and it has been incredibly helpful in putting our animation together. We found this software a lot easier than some we came across, for example, Zu3D which we have used in lessons before in university. I found Zu3D quite hard to grasp when using it previously. When presenting our animation, everthing worked correctly which was a big worry when using a different application. Stop Motion Studio, the animation we used, enables you to add any music, images or sound effects to your animation which we found very beneficial. We decided to add background music to our animation using this feature. We thought it was not appropriate to have sound effects or narration in our animation, as it could draw attention away from the emotion caused by these characters. We thought that emotion could be expressed by the sound of music only for our animation, and hope that this could make the animation more powerful and meaningful. The music we have decided to have in the background is Somewhere Only We Know - Lily Allen, however this is the instrumental version, as we felt that this had much more of an impact on the animation, rather than the original version of the song.

Here is a link to the application we used for our animation:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/stop-motion-studio/id441651297?mt=8

Things to avoid during this assignment:

• One thing that should be avoided when doing animation in this way is that characters used must be able to stand on their own, we discovered this when creating our clay. It is important for the characters' feet to be quite flat in order to be sturdy, otherwise they fall over which can affect the animation.
• When using a camera to take photos, it is most effective if the camera does not move inbetween capturing photos. We managed to think of a way to best avoid this by, first of all, using a handmade tripod to keep the phone as still as possible. The tripod was made up of DVD's to get the right height then two bits of leftover clay to help the phone stay at the appropriate angle. This actually worked surprisingly well.
• In order to avoid moving the phone by touching the screen to capture all the photos, Sarah had a great idea that we should use headphones to capture the shots, which worked perfectly. The quality of the animation could have been greatly affected if we did not use the headphones in this way.
• Frustration! This should definitely be avoided. In all honesty, there were a few moments of this during the creation of our animation, but these were easily solved by lots of little breaks now and then.
• We found it extremely beneficial to upload our video to YouTube before presenting it in class, just to ensure it worked correctly and could be accessed from any device. This can avoid any time consuming technical difficulties.

After viewing other people's animations in the class, there were a few things that could have been done to ours that did not cross our minds. For example, we thought we were restricted to clay, but could of used other different objects like paper or toys. I think next time, we would of taken that into consideration, instead of just using clay objects. The quality of backgrounds that people used for their animations were very effective, and the use of different scenic backgrounds, which could have been a possibilty to use for our animation. However, we thought that the use of just one scene could display a strong effect with the seasons changing and focusing on that one character.

So here are a few photos of the process of our animation:

References

• Statutory homelessness | Homeless Link. 2015. Statutory homelessness | Homeless Link. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.homeless.org.uk/facts/homelessness-in-numbers/statutory-homelessness. [Accessed 29 January 2015].
•  Clay Animation Short: Make a Friend (Uploaded in 2011) - YouTube. 2015. Clay Animation Short: Make a Friend - YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtV4veTUMUs. [Accessed 29 January 2015].