Animating Stop Motion

With the pre production stage complete and a few test shots done it was time to move on to the real deal. We as a group decided that the best way to animate was to do all the bandit scenes in one consistent run and then all of Trinity's scenes in one go and then it could be edited later. Being the only one who has done stop motion before I did most of the animating.

I think that the decisions we made in the planning stage definately helped in this stage as we had put some thought into how practical certain things were for example; The fact that Trinity could be bolted down meant he was an easier character to move however the downside of this was because he was bolted down, after doing the pre production tests I realised that he could not be pivoted and even if he was then the part of his body that was in shot had to appear not to be pivoting.

I think the other major problem I had with animating was that not everything was stuck down properly. Alot of the final product is very jumpy and that is due to accidental nudges and then not being able to put the object back in the same place. So for anyone who is doing stop motion animation, STICK EVERYTHING DOWN THAT DOES NOT NEED TO MOVE! ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING!! However the fact that we had a large group meant that everytime I needed to move the character, I could have 2 - 3 people holding stuff down to prevent me from knocking anything over.

The other problem for our group was the fact that we could not feed our image through a computer and consequently we had no onion skin facility. To make things worse, the SLR camera we were using didnt even show the shot in the screen until we took it. This caused major problems as we could literally not see what we were doing until we had finished.

While animating I was given the chance to improvise and use that to try create a bit of character performance, these were little things such as tapping a table, putting a deck of cards down or even a quick glance over to the other character. I think that the little things like that really do help to give the characters a little edge and can also help to give them a bit of a personality.