Animation 102: Stopmotion suite: Week 10: 27/4/18: Shot story 2.0

In the stop mo suite this week I set to work on refining my short story piece using the feedback I had received today. I looked at the table that I was using in the stopmotion and discovered that it did have a nail in one of the legs. Using plastercine I was able to secure my sun lounger to the stage, however it wouldn't stay in place and still moved so I would need to be extra careful. I began animating the character just as I did before, but this time I used a black pen on the plastercine fly to make it visible, as in the feedback the fly wasn't shown well in the animation.

There were a few problems in doing the animation such as the armature the fly was on, the joints weren't as loose as the one I'd used before thereby limiting the fly's movements. One other issue was when the rig had gotten out of the chair which this time was from the side as I wanted to perfect my standing up sitting down. The issue was in the magnets when I was trying to place them on the feet of the rig under the stage the rig wouldn't stay up and the feet didn't stick down at all. This was beginning to irritate me, especially since it caused me to move the furniture a bit which was what I was trying to avoid doing.

Despite this I was able to complete the animation using the three frame capture settings for the slow areas such as the turn and the stamping his fist on the lounger in defeat. However whilst one problem was solved another began, and that was the time it took to remove the rigs that I was using for the character and the fly. Much like I learned before I couldn't effect the erasing of the rigs on the copy frames in the three frame captures which meant doing it over and over again as I still hadn't found out how to erase the rig from all the frames at the same time without having to do them one by one. I needed to return the camera later on but thankfully the software saved the images taken so I could return the camera and still work on removing the rigs.

The rigs were removed and the piece rendered. In my home time I used Premier pro to add sounds much like before, however this time I decided to add the character sounds I had recorded previously to give the character some life and personality.




Looking back I would think I've improved upon the first short story animation, but there are some areas to improve upon. One of which was the magnets that I used to keep the rig upright. It was clear the magnets weren't the strongest in the suite but the other magnets were being used so it couldn't be helped. I should've realised that Plastercine may have stickiness to it but it wasn't enough to hold down my sun lounger. In hindsight I was probably best at using blue tac to stick down the lounger as that may've been stronger.




In conclusion I had improved over my previous attempt but it may still get feedback on some of the movements in the furniture. In future I shall look into using blue tac to better hold any furniture that I use in stopmotion in place to eliminate the issue, and find stronger magnets.