Comments… hmm where to start….

- I think I got about 80% of how I envisioned it. Definitely not perfect but I’m actually pretty pleased with what I got.

- Normally I’m a pretty humble person (no, not really.. ) but I have to say my own jokes made me laugh (even when I’m stuck watching it a billion times).

- That being said, I think it’s probably worth breaking my back over it… and my neck…and my bruised hip. With an 18-hour flight on Tuesday, I think I’ll be sleeping for the rest of the week.

- Overall it was fun. It made me want to wake up and work on it 20hours a day, not because of my neck that’s killing me preventing me to sleep. Still, I enjoyed it.

- Have to admit the best part of it for me was making all the crap. Thinking back in my undergraduate years in architecture I would be bored with building models and start making irrelevant crap just for fun. How irrelevant? Here’s an example:

(note: I didn’t build that model, just the hangman. And oh, that was at work, oops.)
Now I can make all the irrelevant stuff I want without being scold and say, “I’m doing work!” How cool is that! Not really, but it’s self-entertaining.

- I so want to get a SLR camera, why can’t I win the Mega Million? I’ve managed to get through the term with only a digital camera. I actually do have a crappy handycam that doesn’t work with stop motion software, so not only did I survive(?) (hopefully) the term with a digital camera I did it without stop motion software. Not the best of choices but I’ll live with what I’ve got. For all the shakiness and lightning flashes, I blame the camera for being smart.

More animation comments:

- Overall, the tempo is really fast. Rabbits are agile, wait what?

- Drawing something on paper/computer is a lot easier than making something happen in stop motion. “And then it flies across the screen…” should really rethink these things, much much much easier said than done. At the end the coolness of it doesn’t really match up to the work behind it. I ended up changing a couple of my storyboards making it more feasible and less Photoshoping.

- 3D setbacks, not happening.

- The initial outdoor shot was supposed to be snowy, but I ended up naming it “Spring” also it wouldn’t seem as ‘intense’ if it were two months before Easter.

- Outdoor shot was really hard to shoot and animate. Lighting- Any darker it would of blurred out, any lighter the contrast would be too strong. I had to animate the ending shot backwards because of my fat fingers tight spacing and tiny characters.

- Fading light was difficult without the ability to set my camera.

- Out of time constraints and laziness I didn’t really want to expand my set which would take several additional hours for it to dry. I worked around it by changing the angle of the light which probably doesn’t read. It was kinda hard to get the shadow effect, wish I had a flashlight.

- I cut the originally planned cuts where he walks in and takes off his bandit mask.
1. I don’t like doing walks He doesn’t have feet, amputated. Sorry.
2. I would have had to expand my set.
3. His head is really huge, no way that tiny apron would go on top down = more trouble for me. Also his hands can barely move.
So
I decided to go with another part of his back story (him being a painter) and incorporating the title in addition to establishing the shot.

- Wasn’t really planning this from the start, but what better way could there be to do the credits and titles from the paintings?
Allowed or not, it would be pretty crappy if somebody asked and I would say, “Oh, that’s not stop motion. (Wait isn’t this a stop motion piece?)” So even though I thought about it, I decided against it and I can say it’s all stop motion!

…or maybe I just got a kick out of painting with those little brushes and wanted to show it…
(Horrible planning on writing “STOry” hahaha…)

- I did the credits before doing the sound. Damn. Didn’t want to go through copyright issues and bother having to credit every source, so I went through more trouble of getting all the sounds myself. The quality, not so great but I guess it works.

- More changes.
*Originally the cow was supposed to pat the chick on the head. Pretty impossible considering the very short arms.
*It was supposed to get messy, couldn’t think of a nice touch to make it happen as planned. Violence prevails.

comments that you might not want to know (you should watch the video before reading this):

- I busted the chick’s left eye. The more I fix the worse it looks. I also poked a pin right through the skin of my thumb during the process.

- Outdoor shot. There’s a dent on the cow’s head. I believe that’s the part where my camera fell in and knocked the brains out.

- My battery died right after the chick poked the egg. I didn’t want to reshoot the section that I reshot 4 times already so I tried to work around it by using a close up shot (well the CU was originally planned) but that was about as close I could get with the camera. I can’t do zooms so that’s kinda why the 3 cuts happened.

* Time to Animate: about 4 days

* Software Used: iStopMotion & iMovie / Illustrator for puppet making

storyboard

* Problems encountered & comment: In the beginning of my process working on my final, I first had some difficulties choosing the best narrative for my piece. I changed my story twice, but ended up choosing the best one at the end! I chose to use paper cut-outs & found objects as my puppets.

My stop motion animation is a story of an egg’s dream. There are two different scenes in the animation, which are the dream and the reality scenes. I chose to use paper cut-outs as my puppets for the dream part, and found objects for the reality scenes. I drew my characters using illustrator and used them for the shooting as well as the background. For the transitions between the real & dream, I tried using zooming in into the certain part of the scene, and zooming out with the elements of the next scene that have the same/similar color of the elements from the previous scene.

Especially, the part when the egg goes up to the sky from the sea was a bit tricky to animate. Using a long background I created, I kept the camera in the same position and moved the background down as well as animating the egg going up. I first tried animating the background really fast, so that I could get a blurring effect. However, it was too difficult and didn’t turn out well, so I gave up doing it. Instead, I animated the background slower, so that I could animate the egg easily.

After I finished animating and importing my images into the iStopMotion software, I had my images cut out on the side for some unknown reason. I tried changing the size of the frame in iStopMotion, but didn’t work. (The frame of my final animation is a bit different from the original images.)

Throughout the whole story of my animation, the audience should be able to connect the whole storyline after they watch the entire animation. (Like.. why the egg dreamed of being in the water, being chased by a tweezers, and getting hot from the sun in the sky, etc.)

Overall, I really enjoyed shooting this animation with my own narrative! I hope I had more detailed story, so that I could have made longer animation. However, I’m happy with how it turned out now. If I have an extra time in the future, I’ll definitely go back and revise it to be better ^.^*

Laundry Day~~~~~

* Software Used: Dragon Stop Motion / After Effet for editting sounds and adding texts
* Time to Construct: 12~15 hurs (the washer and dryer took so long to make.. The one appears in the final animation is my third washer and dryer combo)
*Time to Animate: about 16hrs for filming / about 3 hrs to edit.

* Problem encountered: The hardest part of the physical animation was walk-cycle. Since I didn’t want to drill holes on the ground.. (cuz it’s gonna ruin the set) I used magnets instead of screws and nuts. The magnets worked very well when the puppet stand still on his both feet (the strength of magnets was really good). However, he couldn’t stand still on his one foot, so it was problematic for shooting walk-cycle with his whole body appear. For that reason, I just took close-up shots for walk-cycle. It still looks a little bit akward, but looks better than his whole body shots.

* Challenge: Expressing emotion was very challenging. I think that the anger part was a bit off… or confusing for the viewers.. I want to try different ways of expression of anger for the next time in order to make my final animation look better.

Material:Clay

Software:Dragon App

Animation Setup:1hr

Animation Time:2.5hr

comments: I was trying my bear character to look like he’s enjoying his weather and not really paying attention by putting his hands behind his back but now when I look at it, it seems like he’s missing arm or something… I did like clay and walking because I actually used clay beecause I broke my doll.. but still it was quite fun.. I do like that his walking cycle looks like he’s having fun.. Enjoying his weather. It looks quite smooth but some walk looks a little bit awkward. I think my walk was too stylized. As what I said in entire comments, I’m not satisfied.. By after seeing this few weeks later I made the animation. I would love to do it again but it seems like there’s no time..

Well.. still I like how he walks, it’s very cute.. but I always have trouble with walking and lifting so I should probably work more on them.

<Week 14> Jennifer Choi

For my final, I have done something totally different from what you all saw last week!
It is one minute and twenty seconds claymation of a short story that I created.
This is an initial storyboard (it is hard to see what is going on with out description) but I have changed the story along the way. I think it is much better. It was nerve breaking to know that I was just starting a new final and serious unfortunate happened loosing 40 seconds of an animation on the way. (now, I do auto-save) I had to start over but I am so relieved to know that everything is done on time~!

• Software Used: istopmotion 2 crashes

• Time to Construct: a day
• Time to Animate: not sure how long it took ,but it took me less time than I thought.
• Problems encountered: I thought I set up the light well enough but there were still some light flickering. Because my animation continues on one set for about one and a half minute, it was demanding not to touch the background and I could not retouch my puppet on the way, so my frog was getting dirtier and morphing in to a monster. I have a cut in between when the frog looks down to check his honey jar and having heart attack after knowing it is empty. I stopped during the animation to go to a class and when I came back things were completely different. So I had to insert the little part of the frog’s view to get a smooth transition. There are some stuff I want to fix for timing sake especially the part where the frog thinks about his ingenious idea. I thought that is was too sudden, it was right after he looked at the bee and blinked. I wish I could move the frogs action couple frames back where the bee is almost out of the frame so that there is a bit of room to breath.
the Bee was moving across at the same time so I was not able to extend the pause.

So, the animation that I showed last week would be my transition assignment.

It’s done, but you can’t see it until monday.

Ken

The more I look at it the more mistakes I find, it’s like treasure hunting…

Behind the scenes comments:

- Building the set, props, and characters took way longer than I expected. I started at 4pm and started animating at 12am. Not to mention I built everything on the table last week.

- I didn’t feel like going out to buy more glue that I can’t find. Pretty surprised to find out that glue stick + water actually works. (Why did it take so long to dry???)

- Was planning to use the paper towel + paint as base and cover it with clay, but I got lazy it didn’t look too good, plus I kind of liked the texture and rough colors better.

- The set actually isn’t quite finished, I changed the stairs to a slide cause I don’t like animating walks it seemed more fun. It took a long time to adjust the camera, light, and placement to a angle where the whole scene would fit and the borders won’t show. Not too satisfied with the perspective but it works (for now), I was hoping for the depth to be deeper …eh…too bad.

- I was low on white clay, all the art stores around are out of white… ended up buying another claytoon pack. Fail.

- To effectively use was left of my pink clay I had to stuff the bunny with aluminum foil. Barely managed to cover him, it looked pretty good still but caused quite a few problems during animation. Also he’s amputated waist down, sorry.

- First attempt was to use tape as an apron, I taped it wrong making it look really weird, so I used paper towel above it making the tape become his shirt.

- Miniature canvases super cool! It sucks you can’t see the texture in the background, I should include a close up shot just for the sake of it. And too bad I didn’t make it like real canvases so I could hang them, oh well.

- The paintings not so cool as the canvas but I still got a kick out of it. Red eyes, carrots, and nude bunny. (Aaaaand I wonder where I spent my time….) I purposely placed the nude one where it would show, not too clear tho.

- Since nobody will pick it up, the 3 refers to EB-3 (Kodak Elite Chrome). Awesome film.

- Oh the bunny’s name is E.B. (Easter Bunny), not because I was too lazy to think of a name.

- I actually made a trash can out of scrap plastic, but after I went to McDonald’s I had to switch to the ketchup cups.

Comments on animation:

- It’s a rabbit hole, earthquakes are natural. I shall blame the stereo+bass blasting from downstairs.

- I have fat fingers the set is really small, also not propped too stable (oops).

- The switch to clay egg looks way different…………

- Bunny was so hard to animate. I think the foil pretty much killed the character, it was really hard to move even though I did leave some “joints.” Near the end you can really see the the clay falling off at the neck part.

- Pretending I’m unaware of the lack of facial expressions.

- He’s pinned to the “seat.”

- Just realized I didn’t photoshop all of my fingers out. I’ll get back to it.

- Placements of brushes on the table doesn’t match. Couldn’t get egg shells to look like the right proportion.

- Arms are short.

- Brush snapped. I did a replacement on a frame cause he couldn’t reach the poke. Go frame by frame and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

- Eggs (acrylic?) don’t stick to double-sided tape.

- Cow fit perfectly on bunny’s head, I didn’t even need any pins. That shot was pretty fun, I was like this is so funny I need to get a picture of this… oh wait I’ve been taking pics for the past hour and a half…. (well I do have two cameras…)