Process

Instead of jumping straight into my final piece, I wanted to make sure everything was going to look okay before doing it all at once. I decided to break it all down into scenes, and then practice each scene roughly to get an idea and not waste time

In the first part of my animation, I had a red brick wall being built behind her, so I had a go at just the brick wall on its own, there was two ways I could do it, either straight left to right, or left to right but at an angle, I also had to work out, when to start filling in the pieces I had missed at the front, as you can see in this, I left them to the end and it looks quite odd...

The next thing I wanted to look at was walking, again, but this time from a better angle, that I would probably use in my final animation, what I really liked was the shadow the character was creating and obviously moving with them, this gave it a more realistic effect, unintentionally.

Another idea that popped into my head, after the storyboard was to add text into the animation using lego, to keep with the theme, I made a quick video to see what it'd be like, but I wouldn't exactly know where to incorporate this into my final piece.

First go with stop motion and lego together

I didn't really have an idea of what to do at this stage, so I thought I would mess around with a lego character to see what it's like getting a character to walk and how smooth or choppy it looked.

Time to play with Lego

I had a solid idea to work with from my storyboard and it was time to start trying to piece together some sort of animation. A good friend of mine lent me all his childhood coloured bricks and it was time to start building.

Big tub of lego!

So.. Many.. Bricks..

Like filming a movie, you need a set, so my first task was to build a sturdy set where nothing would fall over or move out of place easily when constantly moving pieces around it.

Start of the path and grass

I cleared my living room table and attached masking tape to help secure the base of my set I was creating. The aim was, a grey path, with grass sand and sea in the foreground and buildings and other lego people in the background.

Lego Research

Really swaying towards Lego, the more I research it, the more amazing stuff I find, the time people must have put into some of these videos is insane, I just couldn't have the patience for a 3 minute film made up of thousands of pictures of lego..

Star Wars and Lego is a great combo..

I like the motion of Mario in this one, It's really smooth and if I was to use Lego, all I can think about is a girl walking down the street to the music...

Ideas

Ideas for what type of stop motion I should experiment with and create my final piece..

The Choices:

Plasticine

Drawing

Lego

Whiteboard

I mean, all variations are good, but I think it's going to have to be plasticine or lego for me, they look more fun and not so much easier, but more enjoyable in my opinion

Storyboard

My idea for the story of the animation is a bit like this.

There is a main female character, walking down a path with her arms and feet moving to the rhythm of the song. That is the image I always get when I hear this song.

I also feel the music is quite surreal, and dreamlike. To get this idea across, I kind of thought of inception and how stuff can be built and demolished in dreams, so as she is walking in the first scene, there will be a brick wall being created and then demolished behind her, which should go quite well with the music.

In the second scene, I was thinking of a car scene, the female will be in her car and driving down a road with grass in the foreground and then either buildings would start to be created and demolished, or, she would drive past different buildings, but I'm not sure on how we could get buildings to move into the shot, this will be the scene I play around with the most.

In the third scene, the female will come out of her car and start to move over to a group of people dancing to the same music, and she will walk along a beach to get to them, as this amplifys the point of summer and sunshine, which is what I also think when hearing this track.

To finish off, I was thinking getting all the characters I'm using to stand infront of the house and then wave all at the same time, keeping the same rhythm, with the music to then fade out.

picture of my storyboard

Research

After looking into stop motion and the capabilities of what you can achieve. I decided to research examples of stop motion in mainstream film and television and also what users have created on YouTube.

Optimus Prime vs Bumblebee, this example is filmed so well, the transitions between pictures is seamless and  the lighting never changes, the frames per second on this piece must be quite high and must have taken alot of patience to get each movement right.

The film Coraline is a great example of stop motion within the film industry.

"At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30 to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG) and more than 250 technicians and designers."


The film combines stop motion and 3-D printing. 3-D printing adds so much possibility to facial expressions and movements.


"The film's creators used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions."