Friday, 8 March 2013

Session 4 : Introduction to Stop-Motion Animation


In our last session we used Zu3D to film a short animation using stop-motion. Our group, myself, Arfyn, Ceri and Andrew used toy cars and figures to create a street traffic scene that had an out of control skateboarder causing havoc on a street.

The intention was to have traffic moving up and down a busy street, by using many cars moving on the road and disappearing in and out of the shot. A skater was to be introduced into the road to make the cars swerve and take the onscreen action from linear and smooth running into a very visual experience with lots of movement.

However, the animation took longer than expected, it was very time consuming and required many intricate small movements of the pieces to create the effect of movement.

We found that a slight error or unexpected movement can cause a very visual problem on screen. For example: If you are to pick up a piece of the animation and put it down in the wrong place, it can be seen as “jumping” on screen. We had to work out how many frames should be used per shot, the speed to the action coinciding with the intricacies of each movement. Due to time constraints we did not finalise the sound, and this has shown in the final video.




Original Video - More videos at TinyPic

Despite this, our initial difficulties were no more than expected for using a new piece of kit. Zu3D was fairly easy to use on screen, with its simple frame boxes and layers for sounds and effects.

After this first use I will be considering this for our final animation.

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