Tanner's Typical Day - Stop Motion Skills Development Task

Evaluation

The task was to creating a stop motion short film using Lego as apart of skills development.

The process started with planning out what to use for the stop motion, we had an option between using Lego or Plasticine but we all ended up going for Lego. We all started to build up the characters, scenery and set pieces and around that, a story for the film emerged. A script was also beginning to build up which mainly included the insults for the main character, Tanner was going to say along with the characters he interacts with. Foley sounds were also being researched as especially the animals needed sound effects to be added so it didn't sound completely silent. Before we started any work on the stop motion frames, I did a few tests using Lego figures I already had at home, this was done so we could indicate what frame rate looked the smoothest. The test had shown that the more frames, the more smoother the movements looked on screen meanwhile with decreasing frames, it looks more jagged and didn't look like a natural movement. The shots were captured using a camera, the characters were moved carefully by hand and the process took around 2 weeks to complete, meanwhile that was happening editing of the existing frames were being done on which I did the majority of. Voice acting was done and took around a lesson (1hr 30mins) to complete and to upload into Adobe Premiere Pro, this was so the characters had life to them. Once everything seemed complete, it was then exported and uploaded.

Overall, I was happy with the finished outcome. I thought the stop motion animation looked great, especially being the first time we've all worked on a stop motion project. The sound effect and character audio fitted perfectly which sounded nice and clear, with no issues with the recordings (which is a thing that's popped up in previous projects) and I was quite proud of the editing, as while it was a pain at times to edit (due to so many frames being imported in and timing) it was still a fun learning experience. The story was really funny and well written, and fitted nicely with the animation. 

The only things I think could be improved on, if I ever encounter to do a similar project again, is that some frames were out of focus at times which especially in a fast frame rate, can be very noticeable when watching it back. I did also noticed until after exporting that some character lines didn't make it in, so next time I would definitely check over every file before exporting it.