James Carter

For our Stop motion Animation Challenge we decided to first brainstory ideas using the objects we had available, in this case it was two people and two hand models. The immediate thought was to get the models to fight however this seemed a bit too boring to me to i decided we should use all the available models and have a bit of fun. Eventually we came up with the idea of one model acting as a boss of sorts calling the hounds (hands) to attack the other model, in my head this was some sort of mobster dispute. So we got to work making it a reality, the first problem we faced was getting the camera to stay in the same or similar place between shots however with a combination of teamwork and a bit of camera movement it almost looks like intentional dramatic camera motions added to make the scene more impactful. The second challenge we faced was trying to keep ourselves out of frame, especially in shots where we had to hold up one or two of the models. We solved this problem by adjusting the camera slowly between frames into a more favourable close up angle in order to hide away any hands holding or moving pieces up off the ground. With more time it could have been possible to do this with wires thin enough to not show up on camera which would allow for more clean shots people free and without the need for camera tricks, however by making use of what we had in the time constraints we also learned a valuable team working skill set ingenuity and delegation which massively increased our productivity towards the end of the task.

Due to the fact we did this task later on we had less time to plan for what we were going to create for this challenge, therefore when we were brainstorming ideas it was a crucial step to consider the timescale and how many frames we were going to use before we considered filming the stop motion. This is important because without knowing the correct pacing and moving characters the same amount with each frame, the animation would come out jumpy not representing motion of the characters correctly which could take away from the overall point/story of the stop motion animation. Its important to plan out the events before filming as this gives a good idea of how things should move between frames allowing a much smoother motion path that isn’t too choppy and allowing for a story to be set in motion without any text cues.