Video and Sound Production: Final Project
Week 10 - Week 14
Sylvia Lau (0356130)
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
REFLECTION
Sylvia Lau (0356130)
Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Video and Sound Production: Final Project
INSTRUCTIONS
Final Project: Stop Motion
In this project, we were required to create a short stop-motion animation, the
content could be a social issue or any content that we wanted to present.
During week 10, we needed to prepare a proposal about the story and present it
to Mr. Martin.
While preparing the proposal, I searched for some stop-motion animation on
Youtube to gain inspiration. I searched for different social issues and I saw
a video about food-wasting. At that moment, I remembered the story which I
heard from a middle-aged lady when I was a child, it was about her dream she
was in hell getting punished for wasting a lot of food, the food was all she
had wasted in her past years. That story was actually told to children and
warned them not to waste food.
I told my team member, Yan Ling about this story and she thinks it's an
interesting story to create, so we started to write the proposal and draw out
the storyboard.
Proposal:
Sypnosis:
The story begins with the protagonist not finishing his food, and leaving
quite a lot of food on his plate. Then, the two demons suddenly appear beside
him and bring him to another place. The demons bring him to hell to see the
King of hell. The king of hell tried him for the crime he had committed and
convicted him then sent him to accept his punishment. The protagonist then
falls down to a place where have food that he has wasted before. There are
demons at his back forcing him to finish the food, if he stops eating, the
demons will beat him. It is torture for him to keep eating because he is
already full, so his tears begin to drop, and regret by wasting so much food
in the past. The protagonist wakes up with sweats. He swears he won’t waste
any food again by making sure he finishes his daily meals every day. This
short story's objective is to bring up awareness of food wastage and what a
person can do to mitigate this issue.
Styles of Stop-motion Animation & Reference:
1. CUT OUT:
Use construction paper or cardboard characters and place them on paper while
shooting the animation. The paper is then moved a little in each frame
to create the illusion of movement.
3D Paper
The paper is standing vertically or using paper to do a 3d object to propose
a 3d visual effect.
2D Paper
Black and white with drawing on the paper
2D Paper
Colored drawing paper
2. LEGO AND ACTION FIGURES:
Some use action figures or lego characters for animation. This genre is very
popular on YouTube with many channels dedicated to creating funny skits with
Lego characters. Robot Chicken is a great example of that. They use famous
action figures to make fun of pop culture.
Lego
3. CLAYMATION:
One of the most popular stop-motion forms is Claymation. Working with clay
or Play-Doh characters that can easily be manipulated for animation.
Advanced claymation (such as The Neverhood or Armikrog) uses metal skeletons
on which the clay is then molded for more sturdy rigs.
After analyzing the pros and cons, we select CUT OUT (2D COLOURED) as our
visual reference.
Pros
- Lower cost
- Easy to move
Cons
- Not attractive as the 2 others
- Is in 2D
Storyboard:
The last part of the proposal was to create a storyboard, we used Digitalize
to draw out the scenes. We presented our proposal to Mr Martin and he said the
story was quite interesting, but our drawn storyboard didn’t show many details
and the scenes were too simple, which made him feel that the final outcome
wouldn’t be able to get a good grade. He suggested us to put more movement to
the characters and more scenes.
Redrew storyboard of scene 1
We had another discussion to make the story more interesting, the movement of
the character, and the scenes. I redrew the storyboard with more details.
There were still some scenes that we were not sure how to present it such as
the scene in which the protagonist needs to throw away his food, how the
monster shows up, the protagonist gets his punishment in hell, the falling
scene, and much more.
References
We proceeded to the next stage which was preparing the materials. We created a
mood board on Pinterest to save the references that we had searched. The above
images were the references we decided to use in our project. As for
characters, my group mate suggested to made it like a puppet so it would be
easy to change movements during the shooting.
The video tutorial for making the paper puppet: https://youtu.be/luxHBmMQClI
Progress:
For our first decision, we thought of using colored paper, but the color paper
that we had were limited, so we changed to using white paper and color
them.
After we had done the first scene materials, we tried to shoot the first scene
in the studio. We struggled and tried different attempts at shooting it, as
there were some problems that we needed to be careful of, for example, the
movement of the character should not move too much, the lightings, and the
backgrounds should be fixed.
The shooting progress took two days to complete. After shooting the first
shot, we were more familiar with it and finished the shooting quicker.
Scenes:
Scene 1 Shot 1
Scene 1 Shot 2
Scene 1 Shot 3
Scene 1 Shot 4
Scene 1 Shot 5
Scene 2 Shot 1
Scene 2 Shot 2
Scene 2 Shot 3
Scene 3 Shot 1
Scene 3 Shot 2
Scene 4 Shot 1
Scene 4 Shot 2
Scene 4 Shot 3
The next stage was to edit the scenes in Premiere Pro and made them to a
video. Each of us would edit two scenes, I edited scenes 1 and 4, while my
group mate edited scenes 2 and 3.
Editing Scene 1:
Editing Scene 4:
I set the duration time of each shot to 00:00:05. Besides, I also needed to do
color correction as some of the shots had different lighting. Then I nested
the shots to one video and imported all the videos into one.
Sound Effects
After finishing editing the video, we opened an Excel sheet and put the sound
effects that we found into it.
Scene 1 Final Outcome:
Scene 4 Final Outcome:
Final Submission:
Youtube Link:
Overall, I enjoyed doing this task together with my friend, it was a very fun project to work on. Without the help of my friend, it would be hard for me to complete all of these. After we compiled all the scenes into one video, we were very satisfied with the outcome and the efforts we put in were totally worth it.
At the very first stage which was preparing the storyboard, we were just thinking to make the scenes simple. But after we had a consultation with Mr. Martin, his feedback gave us the motivation to do more scenes and make the animation more interesting. Although the progress took us a lot of time to finish and sometimes struggled quite a lot to think about the arrangement of the scenes, we figured out the way and divided the work together.
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