In-Class Stop Motion

A Beary Bad Day

Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion Animation

What is a Stop Motion?

   
     A stop motion is an animation that involves the process of taking several pictures while at the same time moving the objects you are using in your scene. Once you have captured all of the pictures you will use in your scene, you can then combine the several photo's taken to form a video. Anyone with a camera and props can create a stop motion, but it will take time till you have your final product but in the end, your final creation will be worth it. While stop motion might be tricky and require lots of patience, it also requires a lot of thinking if you want to come up with something original and creative. You have to know your boundaries, what you can and cannot do. So I will share with you what process my group and I had to take in order to create our stop motion.

Coming up with an idea:

The three main gummy bear heroes.

   
     The first steps my group and I had to take when creating a stop motion is coming up with a plan. Everyone needs an outline or some sort of idea in order to successfully start and finish a project. So we each had one day to come up with a few ideas to share the next day. We met up and shared our lovely ideas while group members agreed and disagreed. We got stuck on two ideas and then broke down which idea was and wasn't possible in the time we had and the difficulty. After all of that hard decision making, we finally agreed on one. Our idea was to create a scene made out of candy, almost like a miniature set, and have our main characters be different colored gummy bears that had to fight off a giant creature that had invaded their homeland only to cause pure destruction. Obviously we knew that this task would not be simple but we were definitely going to put a challenge at our hands and fight through it, just like we planned our gummy bears to.

Beginning of process:

   

Creature coming to destroy gummy bear territory.

     The first step we took to begin the process was to assign each group member a role. In order to make this happen, we needed lots of candy, a camera and cardboard. All of these items played major parts in creating our scenery. After gathering all of the required item, we then began the set building process. We had to make three gingerbread houses, which brought back childhood memories, then we had to make a background behind the houses and grass. We decided that the best gingerbread house would be the main characters house and the rest would be the extra gummy bears houses. We used colored construction paper for the grass and the sky. Building the walls of the set were tricky because you had to angle the walls to where it would let light pass through so when the photo process began, you could see the set and what was going on on the set. We then finished up the set by applying dum dums (lollipops) in the ground to act as trees and taking gum drops and sticking them to the ground to act as bushes. We set up the gummy bears in their first position and gave them toothpicks to act as weapons. Now the photo process can begin.

Photo process:

   
     The photo process was by far the most nerve-racking part of the whole process. You couldn't make one mistake or you would have to restart whether that meant accidentally knocking the object over or forgetting to move another object or etc...but good thing luck was flowing around us because there was not one mess up that happened. But before taking photos, we had to plan out how many shots we needed in order to make the video look the least laggiest possible. So we sketched out storyboards which allowed us to see what actions where going to happen, when they were going to happen, where they were going to happen and what type of shot was needed in order to make the scene look decent. After capturing tons of photos of our gummy bears and giant bionicle creature, we went into photoshop to connect the photos together and edit any weird color contrast differences in each shot. We also had to create credits and of course add in music for suspense and emotion.

Conclusion:

     

Gummy bears fighting off the creature to save their land.

     Given a finished product, we then got to have enjoy eating the left over candy an fun destroying the set. We were proud of the individual work each group member contributed to help end the project with a great project. We got to share our final product with many others while they showed us their creations and gave us feedback, the majority being positive. For my first stop motion I can say that it was a very fun process and I hope to one day do it again but a little more advanced so I can have a new challenge for myself.

Final product: