Assignment:
Our first assignment for Animation was to create a 30-60 second stop motion animation in pairs. Beyond that, we had freedom to do whatever interested us.
Idea:
During our brainstorming phase, all of our ideas wound up centering around character-driven stories that explored some sort of fun interaction between those characters. My solo projects across courses have often used food as a material for uses other than eating, and during the brainstorming, the idea of fruits that wanted to try on other fruits’ “clothes” popped up and took hold.
Process:
We began by doing some storyboarding. For each scene, we considered what materials we would need for the main action and the set. With a list of materials in hand and a shot list in mind, we went shopping. After buying materials, we began constructing each of our sets. We used construction paper and foam board to make the building and signs, hanger wire and tracing paper for the changing room and the same hanger wire for the clothing rack. We used more foam board for little accessories (like the Citron shopping bags at the end.) We also used foam board + coffee mugs from the ITP kitchen to create the platform for the lemons in the Citron windows in the opening shot— a little stoke of luck that the coffee mugs were the right height!
Once we began shooting, we had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted to shoot. The trickiest part, however, ended up being getting the banana character to stand up on its own. At first, all we needed to do was cut the bottom off of the banana to create a flat base. But after a few falls, the center of gravity started to shift a bit and the banana could no longer stand. We tried super gluing it to a piece of foam board with a banana-sized circle cut out. This * sorta * worked and wound up being our solution; if the piece had been any longer, we would have needed a better long-term solution. By the end of the film, the banana was beaten up and on its last legs. Many thanks to that banana for its sacrifice :)
Na edited out stray hands and the like before we exported our footage from Dragon Frame. I handled the sound editing from my apartment, where I had a microphone setup and Logic Pro X on my computer. I recorded almost all of the sound effects in the piece from scratch, save the footsteps, portal noises and cash register sound, which I grabbed from freesounds.org.
Reflections:
Stop-motion is my favorite kind of animation, and I really enjoyed this process. We spent a whole lot of time on everything and still had many areas where we had to compromise for the sake of time. Whether it was scenes that could have made the plot funnier and/or more meaningful, small details that could have made shots look more professional, or just better lighting, we knew there were things we would have liked to do differently even as we were shooting. Still, I think both of us are happy with the end product given the handful of days we had to do this.
I’d love to take these learnings and do another stop-motion soon!