Animation | Week 1 | Stop Motion
This week's assignment is stop motion, and I teamed up with Zahra & Hui Yi.
In our first meeting, we agreed to creating a puppetry-piece using LED bulb and components we have for PComp. The story was about how the components came to life when no one was looking.
Hui Yi went to sketch the storyboard, and I prepped the materials we would need to film.
In our next meeting, we started filming. This is a list of equipments/props we had:
White background thingy we found on the floor
2 LED light panels
Canon camera with kit lens
Styrofoam block to stick the LED bulb upright
White paper to cover the styrofoam
LED bulb & other electronic components
It was also our first time using Dragonframe, and although it was hard getting started with the software, it got easier after a while (I especially like the onion layer feature).
We filmed for about 10 hours, and it was especially hard because of several reasons:
Animating the LED bulb by bending & sticking the legs onto the styrofoam block was not a great idea. Walking cycle was already a pain to begin with, and trying to bend and position the LED bulb upright just added extra difficulty.
The ER ran out of AC cable for the LED light panels, so overtime the light kept dimming and we had inconsistent lighting throughout.
People were filming around us and kept bumping into our setup.
But we finished filming at the end of the day, and we made sure we adjusted the number of frames for different movements (e.g. build-up vs. actual action).
Last step was to edit the footage & add sound effects by Zahra on AE.
Here is the final video:
