Well for my animation i had decided to animate using plastercine doing stop motion. the story is that a small sheep called stumpy is getting bullied for having very short legs and is not allowed to be included in the games that the other goats are playing. stumpy is very alone. Well in the end a wolf gets into the sheep pen and all the tall sheep run to a small tunnel in the hill, but all the other sheep were tall and couldn’t in the tunnel, but stumpy was short and escaped through the tunnel and on the other side of the hill was a hole heard of sheep as stumpy as him. and as all good fairy tales end he lived happily ever after.
well to start i need to create the set for my characters to be in, i started to make the barn all from paper and then fences and dressings for the set all from paper which was a rather lengthy procedure but i feel that they were successful and have left it with a very convincing set for the animation to take place.
Well after I had completed the set i was ready to start the creation of the characters. I had allot of trouble with this as I was unable to get any plastercine so i had to resort to Play Dough which was not as good for modeling or the animation process as it was not as stiff and lost its shape and cracked when i tried to bend for the animation process.
This is the original model but was unable to stand was too soft heavy and inflexible.
I then started to research on the internet for tips on using Play Dough and the main suggestion was to give the character a skeleton to help support the weight i decided to use pipe cleaners and wire that is used in the decorating of cakes.
First attempt this was not strong enough and the Play Dough was not sticking on the skeleton very well.
I then found that the Play Dough was too heavy for the structure in the middle and need to find a stronger way to have the mid section. so I had a second attempt.
This method was an improvement but it was still not what i was after and i was struggling to come up with a better skeleton that was light supported the Play Dough well and allowed for flexibility for the animation process. So my dad kindly offered his help too me and came up with the model that i am going to use, which will provide all the key elements that i need for the skeleton too work.
Above is the skeleton that my sheep are molded around. The key to the success of this skeleton is the fact that each sheep is so easily repeatable to keep the look of the characters similar and reparable during the animation without it being obvious that the model has been repaired. I found that the sheep character was the most difficult character to create.
But next i started on the Farmer character and although he is just a background character i really wanted to make him as detailed as the rest of the characters and the set. below are the picture of the farmer in production.
I was very happy with the result of the farmer and I am looking forward to having him in the animation.
Well i took the photos using a cannon SLR and some small lights to light up the set pics of the set up below
The filming was a very hard procedure and unfortunately did not go as well as I had planed it to go. The main problem that i had was the fact that the characters under the lights dried out and cracked and i was unable to manipulate the plastercing in the characters so the animation style was much simpler than i had originally intended. Along with the trouble manipulating the characters quite a few characters completely fell apart and were not able to be repaired. This caused me alot of trouble and i had to be quick to finish as I feared that I would not be able to complete the animation if the characters deteriorated any more.
Well at last after a difficult and lengthy procedure I have a final video. YAY. Well what can I say the editing procedure was difficult and with death of my old mac book i was lacking in software which was annoying. I ended up using iMovie as i dint have final cut, well when I imputed the photo’s into IMovie i was unable to speed up the playing the images up to a speed which made the movie play at a speed which was smooth to watch. Once I had exported the clips as a MOV even though they were not playing at the correct speed, I then used the uni computers and final cut to speed it all up. I then took the clips back in to iMovie where i put all the clips in to order added some photos in and the ken Burns effect to give it a more dynamic feel. Once I had all the clips playing how I wanted them I then proceed too overlay the voice over and cropped and edited the movie clips and the sound to make it work. There was a few problems with the sound I didn’t have an external mic and had too use the built in one so the sound quality was not as good as i had wanted it. Well below is the final cut of the animation.
Overall I was rather happy with the standard of the animation and I had allot of fun with it even though I had allot of problems I am Please with the outcome.
