For this weeks task we were put into groups and told to create an experimental stop motion animation based on one of four themes:
-Wildlife/Sealife
-Growth
-Conflict
-Cant't remember the last one.... I remembered it now, its Dance
In our groups we had many ideas and these ideas varied in very different mediums which was the whole aim of this task, to experiment stop motion in different mediums. An example of an animator that used a very different medium was Lotte Reiniger who used silhouetted characters all made up of handcut characters. The idea of using hand cut characters is a very interesting approach to animation however it would be a very time consuming process as we can see in this video.
I really like the idea of using magazine cutouts to create a very surreal and interesting animation. One of the ideas that I had suggested to my group was to create an animation entirely of cutouts of a hand moving onto magazines and taking parts out of the magazine such as pictures of arms, legs etc and assembling itself into a humanoid character however we all agreed that this idea would be more ideal for the 6 week project and it would not be finished in a week so we decided to go with small experimental animations each only a few seconds long.
The first idea was suggested by Robyn to use rice as a medium... The animation was simple, a flower that grows from a seed. Rice as a medium is very easy to use and can be moved around and formed into anything when looking from a birds eye view. In this video you can get a rough idea of how we did it..
The only issue really with rice was that you had to be very careful when you moved it as you displace the rice when you are drawing in it so sometimes you have to just have to pinch some out. Other minor issues really are that rice is only limited to 2D and that when you get home you find grains of rice everywhere in your bag and pockets :S
The second video we made was a quick improvised idea for using the stickfas character, again in the theme of growth. The idea was to use the stickfas and just make all the limbs move into it and form into the model. I managed to film a couple of seconds while we were filming the animation.
The stickfas models are very good to use for animations as movements are not restricted and most movements we can do as humans the stickfas can also perform however due to the size of the stickfas we found it extremelt difficult to move it around accurately. We found that we knocked it alot and this is slightly apparent in the finished animation.
The third idea was my idea of using a whiteboard with a person stood infront. The original idea was to have a person stand there and on the white board a finger taps him and when he turns around the hand punches him and knocks him out however I didnt think about how I was going to draw the hand the same size each time I drew it so we decided to just go with something simple like a very big rock. Again I filmed us in the process of creating this animation.
In this animation we found it fairly easy and quick to animate and with the help of our professional actor (Jack) we could really work together in a quick and effective manner. There were actually no problems with using this white board medium apart from finding the right camera angle to make it look like the object in the whiteboard interacted with our live actor.