Week Five: Stop... in the Name of Animation

Coming into class last Monday, I really was not sure what to expect. My group members and I had talked through e-mails about what objects we were going to bring, so that was not a surprise, but it was the whole idea of stop motion animation using a Super 8 camera that was pretty new to me. However, I had done stop motion animation before. Well, I had done it years ago when I had done a summer session at the School of the Arts in Winston Salem, North Carolina, so it was still pretty unfamiliar territory. The moving of the objects around in the different planes of vision seemed easy enough. After all, it was pretty self-explanatory. You moved one object or all of the objects a fraction of the complete movement, clicked off a few frames, and then repeated the process until the action was complete. Then, it was all repeated for every motion within the scene. That sounds easy enough, right?

Well, that was easy enough. The difficult part was trying to make the objects tell a story like we had seen in previous weeks in the stop motion animation films by Pes. Though there was not always a narrative structure to the films, there was still a clear action taking place, and the movement of the objects, no matter how random they were, made sense. So, with an M&M figurine, two Pez dispensers, a box of candy hearts, a Pokemon figurine, a Donald Duck figurine, a handful of change, an old key, and some dental floss, my group members and I proceded to make a film that made sense. This was easier said than done, but we made it work.

With the Sharpie marker we had, we drew faces on the blank sides of the candy hearts, allowing two different colors to be back up armies for the respective Pez dispensers that would be battling over a key that would lead them to where Donald Duck was being held captive, and we began filming our epic battle scene. Everything went rather smoothly, but the most difficult part was trying to make the Pez that were flying out of the dispensers mouths as ammunition look like they were actually airborne. So, we used thread from another group and held them in midair while they slowly moved across the plane of action, and we just decided to hope that the string would not be noticeable.

The ending of our film was sort of made up as we went along, since we were not sure which side would actually win the battle or if the actual escape of Donald Duck from his barnyard fence prison would actually take place. However, with some quick thinking, we were able to come up with an ending that both made sense and was particularly entertaining, at least to us, so I hope that it turns out okay when we get our film back from the developer.

Overall, the stop motion animation was a lot of fun, and I think my group’s will turn out pretty well. Getting in the editing lab and being able to look at the footage should be interesting, but I am really looking forward to seeing how everybody’s turned out. Not only that, but I am looking forward to seeing how everyone’s elements projects turned out, as well. The final product for my group looked pretty cool. There were parts that I liked and parts that I loved, but overall, I feel that the project itself was a success. I cannot wait to see everybody else’s’. Monday should be pretty interesting.