Stop-Motion Projects

Having survived the in class screening and convinced our lecturer to give us a little more time to perfect it, I present a demo of my progress at overhauling the soundtrack for the video.

Considering the main character is meant to be fairly posh, I decided to use a bit of Beethoven, “8th Symphony 2nd Verse”, which I think suits the opening quite well.

I was doing this using Adobe Premiere and quite frankly the program sucks and still creates chocky horrible video even when exported using the same settings as the original video. So I’m going to go into the Uni tomorrow and work on it using Final Cut and Soundtrack Pro.

Now this was uploaded to a video site for the purpose of demoing the sound, so the website has automatically resized it and made it crap quality but you should be able to get the general idea of the soundtrack. Also I want to make the foley loud enough to be heard in amongst the music and as you go in further into the office the foley obviously gets louder.

Richard

Watch Uni Stop-Motion Project (Preview) in Animation |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Okay, it’s been a busy week, but we aren’t throwing in the towel!!

I’ve compiled a first draft of the video, which my team will now get stuck into and liven it up with sound! Having some other assignments to do still I haven’t done any Photoshop tidy up yet, and I probably won’t have time until Sunday-Monday to work on it, so it’s likely what we are up to is what we’ll have to show come Screening Day! We have to reshoot (on Saturday) the part where the humans come out of the office, because my hands were like in the picture too much. We are going to try a different angle which I am hoping will work out good.

I kind of have a very high bar of standards when it comes to making things, so I’m not going to say what I think of it, but to say the least, it’s not Wallace and Gromit, but it’s not absolutely terrible either :p Should be worth the watch, and I hope it lives up to the expectations people are having in this.

Richard

Okay today was a very special day for us…the day we FINALLY started shooting!! Unfortunately there was still a heck of a lot of stuff we had to prepare so we didn’t get to do very much of it…

We had a got at shooting the opening sequence, which is a sort of exploration of the office thing…Going over the shots we took, I think we will have to reshoot them later. We had the camera on auto and it really messed up the focus ALOT…like when you are entering the office, it focus on the back wall and everything up close goes blurry…*sighs* But now that we’ve done it once, I’ve got a bunch of things we can do to counter the problems and get it right the second time round

The biggest thing that happened today was that the characters were finally at the point of putting them all together, and I have to say, they look awesome!! I’ve still got to put together three more characters tonight, and probably redo the female monkeys head to match the male monkey.

Ohs and also a BIG thanks to Jana who is letting us borrow her camera remote switch…honestly I think today would have gone ALOT worse if we didn’t have it…So Jana expect your name in our credits!!

I’m also going to break down the storyboard into blocks tonight to simply shooting it tomorrow. And maybe construct a mini doley for smoother panning

Here’s some shots I took of characters etc…

Richard

I was really surprised, despite not having practiced modeling very much since the last time I tried…My monkey head came out soooooooooo much better than the last one I did, and it actually resembles the sketch I drew!!!

The way the models will talk is using a simple mouth swap method…I’ve made four mouths which cover the basic A…E..I..O/U (same sorta expression), and we just have to swap them around to make him talk!!

Say hello to Mr Monkey!!

Richard

Okay, we plan to do the shooting tomorrow…I mean if we don’t, we will totally run out of time and won’t get this thing finished. I’m gonna attempt to get most of the remainder things ready tonight, but I am almost certain we’ll have to do more shooting on Sunday because there are a few things that are still not ready yet (such as the gorilla who won’t even have clothing come Saturday :S)

However it’s really starting to look great, so I took some pictures of what we’ve achieved up until now. More to come later…

Richard

Here are some pictures of the characters I’ve been working on. Still need some work but getting there. We’ve had to change the sizes of the hands and feet after realising how big the characters were going to be.

After Richard put the pieces of the office together, Erin took some pictures with my camera to see what it would look like and I must admit I’m impressed. I can’t wait to offically start shooting the animation. 

Here are some photos of all the armatures I prepared last week. I glued on foam and varied body shapes to give them individuality.

Progress is getting there, there should be some shots of the set FINALLY put together up later.

Richard

Everyone seems fairly busy now that regular classes have started back up, though I still seem to have a lot of free time. The current progress on the design process isn’t too bad, but there’s still a fair bit to do.

The walls have been repainted/fixed and look even better than they did before, and I’ve had some blocks cut up to stick under the floor to raise it so we can get our hands in under the set. All that’s left now is to drill a bunch of holes, and a few VERY minor paint touch ups along the edges. I was gonna cut the carpet fabric too but realised I didn’t have anything to draw lines on it.

5 armatures have been modified and have sponge flesh glued onto the wire. I would post up the pictures I took but my internet is throttled at the moment, so I can’t. I have still got to redo the gorilla armature, and make up new hands for all the armatures who don’t have any hands. Then if there’s time, and enough materials left, make more human armatures, otherwise we will only have 3 humans!!

Mum hasn’t really worked on the clothing much, so I’m hoping she’ll put a bit of time towards it over the weekend or else I’m going to have to learn how to sew!! :S

I am going to be modelling characters (head, hands, and feet), come Sunday when we can all finally get together and get the rest of the stuff sorted!! I think we should have a deadline in that we must get all of this sorted by the end of next Tuesday’s class (or end of next week MAX!!!), or else we are going to really struggle, especially if everyone is going to be as busy as they were this week

The filming shouldn’t take much time, which I’m certain we could probably do in a couple of hours as long as we are focused and into it. We just need to make sure we have enough time for post-production which is where this whole thing actually happens.

Sunday is when my internet goes back up again…so I’ll post up all the pictures I’ve been taking and will take then, so that ought to be good.

Richard