Author Movement - The animation

So we wanted to film our animation in our costumes but after discussing it more thoroughly, we realised that this might not be the best idea. Plus our third group member hadn't made her costume yet. I'd made a stop motion animation during my foundation year at uni and remember it being really enjoyable so we decided to attempt to make little plasticine characters and film them in stop motion.

Luckily, my character was an underwater character, Rachels was on earth and Laurens was in the sky. We decided to make a set each with our characters own habitat. We went to Poundland in search of materials to make our sets with. The idea is to have Laurens character fall from the sky in to earth, then for us to end up in the underwater world where I live.

I kept mine quite simple as I didn't want too many distractions for when it came to making the animation. I structured and painted my box in underwater colours and drew little fish and jellyfish to hang. I also made some octopus tentacles with card and bubble wrap.

I made a rough cut out and shot a 10 image stop motion just to see how well the lighting, set and characters would work.

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Now that everyones set is done, we've bought our plasticine and have began making our models. I made mine looking at my costumes photos I took the other week.

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We decided to stick to the original script since our theme is 'play' but found it really difficult to follow. We started off by putting the camera on a tripod but couldn't get the perfect zooming we wanted. We then moved the camera back on to a flat surface but it kept shaking as we took the photos. Also, it was really hard to animate the plasticine models as we made a plasticine ball and couldn't record it bouncing properly.

I think overall, it worked out fine and the final piece was still quite fun to watch. We spent hours on this and only ended up with a 45 second video which was my only issue. I think I underestimated just how many photographs it'd take to make a longer animation that lasted at least a minute and a half.

THE FINAL ANIMATION