stopmotionintro

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I decided to look into studio Laika a bit for some personal research and I found that I really like what the company stands for. They’re been a key force in revitalizing the stop motion industry and I feel like that is a major feat considering the reputation that stop motion animation had pre-Laika.

The studio is very open about their working process and so there is a lot of easily accessible information online which gives valuable insight into their working process. Laika blends traditional puppet making techniques with innovative modern technology such as 3D printing that I feel has really acted to make the process of stop motion films a lot more approachable.

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I forgot to post these earlier but these are the stories for the walking with expression change and the picking up the box animation we did. 

Both these animations were definitely changed but the introduction of a partner into the project and I’m not complaining. It’s pretty cool that your ideas can develop in new directions so quickly once you have a partner involved in working on a project. 

I felt pretty lost while story boarding these two scenes and i think I’m starting to find that I really struggle to think in a 3D sense. 

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So this project ran into quite a few problems. For this animation I was paired with Ella and we ran into issues setting up our camera as well as maintaining our lighting. I feel like overall we also struggled to communicate our intended movements and something about the overall animation just kind of doesn’t work. 

I enjoyed working with Ella and I feel like we work well together but I feel like we were both pretty uncomfortable with stop motion animation and unsure of how to execute our intended motion. I feel like our discomfort comes through in the form of stiffness in this animation. 

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Ruth and I finished our standard ball bounce a bit early and started working on a ball bounce with secondary action a bit but sadly couldn't finish it because we had to wrap up and had a class after. It was off to a pretty good start though.

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I actually really enjoyed working with the Plasticine for this animation and I was paired up with Ruth. Overall I’d say we did a pretty good job even though the Plasticine was pretty tough. 

The only major issue that we kept running into was catching our hands in the shots while we were working. I feel like that’s just something that comes as a result of working with someone you’re not entirely familiar with though and overtime happens less when you get used to your working partners. It definitely made me question how effective of a communicator I am in a group setting though.

It was pretty cool to get a chance to use the proper stop motion set ups in the filming booths of the media lab (I don’t actually remember what they’re called, oops). And I wish I had put more time into experimenting with stop motion.

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This was the first stop motion exercise we did and I was partnered up with Tan. The goal was to have a character walk on screen and change from two expressions.

We wanted to portray the emotions of someone who was sneaking around cautiously but realized the threat they were facing was not that serious in the first place and being a bit annoyed while walking away. 

We struggled with moving the armature around a bit and halfway through one of the legs really came loose but overall I think we managed to capture our intended emotion pretty well. 

If I could change one thing about this thought I would have made the pause when the character looks back a bit longer and have the drop their arms a bit to indicate that they relaxed a bit more and didn’t feel under as much of a threat.