I never though stop motion to every be easy. Especially after watching the making of Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, it's a very long and slow procedure that requires a lot of patience and endless motivation. You need to have a set goal of finishing and ignore the fact that you'll have to do hours of endless editing and cleaning tomorrow, before actually putting the figure into the frame that needs to be created.
I tried to work chronologically because during the film my model will have to get flattened and cut up so I wouldn't be able to switch the order of photography sessions. Therefore, I made a list of scenes to photograph so I wouldn't possibly miss anything that is if importance to add.
Walk cycles are much easier said than done. Still I think a walk cycle done with clay is much easier than it it when drawn frame by farm for 2D animation, especially when the legs are touching in any way. I had to learn this the hard way, inset of a simple side view, I decided to make my first walk cycle of a 1/3 turn and have very slow movement so it took forever to animate a simple walk cycle. Each frame in the of just the walk cycle consisted of at least 8 layers if drawing.
The clay walk cycle was much easier to do, because moving the legs physically is a lot easier than redrawing it over and over again. A few test shots of people walking did the job and make it easy enough to make a walk cycle to actually look like the character is walking.
A downside to this was, as previous describe in a post, the high temperature of lighting making the clay extremely soft and malleable. So when moving the figure into it's next position it would slightly flatten down every time.
Along the way I had to add and remove scenes in accordance to relevance and because I was constantly thinking about my lack of identical model. So I photographed extra scenes just in case I needed to sue them at some point in the animation. Even if I don't use them, it won't go to waste; it would still be worth the photographs because it would cause me to gain more experience and practice more.
Realistically, not every scene recorded and animated goes into a film, depending on level of relevance, some scenes have to be removed and whether they're useful or not depend on how the film turns out in the end.
I quite like how this turned out when placed together and exported as a video. The hand in the frames appearing and moving as the clay model was moved, it just looks good in my opinion. I already really liked the consistency of the figure and how smooth the movements were. Although it meant much more frames to edit and clean, it also meant I could slow down the animation and still have smooth movement.
Sometimes it's just easier to record the action and import all the video frames into photoshop and turn them into still then. Although it is a much longer procedure, at the moment of doing it, it just seemed like the easier way out. I hadn't realised that the trouble would be the same every time. I either move the figure ever so slight slightly and take a new image every single time, or I record a video and go through 5 rounds of editing on phototshop to get it into the frame.
There wasn't much to this, but it does have significant relevance to the plot of the film, wherein she puts her 2D paper hair on and believes she's now a 2D beauty just like everyone else. Small arm movement and every so slight movement of the hair as she puts it on is what makes this scene.
Again, I used the idea of recording it instead of animating each scene. This was die to the fact that it would be much harder to pause and hold the model in the air and mange to get a smooth animation scene than to record and go the long way about it. It wouldn't be an accurate get of photos if it wasn't recorded. I tried that method and it would work because holding the model in the air with tweezers was difficult enough. If I held too tightly it would make a hole and/or rip off and if I held it too gently it would slip right off and fall down. Therefore I had to record a quick few scenes so I could pick and choose which scene or frolic I preferred from the selection.
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