How I Created My Stop-Motion Animation

 If you haven't seen it already, I released a video featuring a new song (now available to buy -here-) as well as a stop-motion animation to go along with it. 


Patience.  This project was a good test of patience.  Patience and planning.  802 total photos (which probably isn't that many for a stop-motion project, but that's what my final tally was).   Here's a basic breakdown on how I created the animation for this specific video:

• Sketches and planning: characters and scenes.  I knew I wanted to create actual characters for this video to initiate some sort of emotional relationship with the viewers.  Based on the lyrics, I decided to create a cartoon version of me (side braid and all!) along with an owl meant to personify "innocence".  Took me about an hour to really design what I wanted the characters to look like.  Don't believe me?  I have a sketchbook of probably seven pages with multiple owls on each page.  Sketching was the hardest part for me, honestly.

• Drawing, coloring, cutting: NOT my favorite stage.  Everything you see in my video was made by yours truly.  The worst part was cutting out everything, especially the letters and the raindrops.  Many times I felt tempted to use my scissors as a weapon in place of a tool.  But alas...  It also took me a really long time to figure out a color combination for my owl - I'm not really sure why; I probably colored twelve of them until I found a suitable color match.  I should have colored them in a bit darker, though, because trying to saturate them later on became a problem.
 

 
• Understanding movement.  I had to make sure I left out/separated certain things I knew were going to be moving, such as the owl's wings or the girl's mouth.

• Landscape : The main landscape I chose was a lot of fun to put together.  In order to make the clouds and sun rays move, I had to make sure they weren't taped down.  Same thing with the swing.  Everything else, however, was taped down so there wouldn't be any accidental nudges giving the illusion of movement.

• Trial run:  I set up my tri-pod and started clicking away.  I highly recommend getting a remote shutter release to eliminate any accidental bumping.  It also makes it go by so much faster :)  I took about 150 photos of the opening scene to get an idea of what it would look like. Originally, I had all the lyrics written out as dialogue, but later decided to nix it because it seemed unnecessary and spoon-fed.  I realized that the range of motion had to be less wide.  Small movements made for better animation.  I also had to think about what the owl's wings would look like if it was landing or taking off.  It only took me about 50 photos to realize how awkward my owl looked flailing its arms in random directions that defied gravity.  It looked like it was drowning in the middle of the sky.  Whoops!
• For the opening scene, I had to move about ten things: the sun rays, clouds, both of the owl's wings, and the girl.  EACH TIME.  Luckily, when I did the final shoot...I decided to only use the sun rays and clouds as supplement movement.  
• Letter scenes: These were fairly easy.  I essentially added a letter for each photo.  When the whole phrase was complete, I began to move all the letters in between pictures.  This helped create a scattering effect.
• Raindrops.  LEAST FAVORITE TO SHOOT.  Every photo I added 1-2 raindrops and had to move all the existing drops.  It became difficult remembering which ones I already moved.  It was also difficult to move the raindrops without moving the umbrella or owl (which I should have taped down before I started shooting the rain).  

• Shooting time.  I spent about two hours on a trial run and three/four hours on the first half of the video.  I tried to make sure there wasn't any uncontrolled light that would affect the brightness of my photos (still managed to get my own shadow, though.  Ha!)  By the time I created everything for the second half and took the photos, a good 18 hours had passed since the first picture.  For the record, a lot of sleep was lost on account of this project not only by me, but by Brian Mirsch as well.  All for the sake of creation!

• Editing.  I didn't do much editing aside from saturation and contrast changes.  Most of the editing was contributed to adjusting the frame times in iMovie to show (somewhat) normal motion and to coincide with the lyrics.  The speeds vary from .1-10 seconds.   

• Export, upload, share!  <--- my favorite step ;)

 It is now your turn to create a stop-motion animation :) If you do, be sure to send it my way!  I'd love to see other projects.

That's all for now!
xo