Stop Motion - Story boarding Part 2

After talking with the other members of the group, I suggested that we completely revamp our idea as our initial storyboard was limited due to the use of a set we made.

I figured that with a small and limited space to work with, we would be technically limited to a small variety of shots and camera angles.

To overcome this issue, we would need to remove the box, but in doing so major points of our story would need to be removed. As a result we opted to completely overhaul our idea.

We decided to stick with using clay for our animation as we wanted to show a use of creative skill.

Story Board Part 1

Story Board Part 2

I created a story that kept in line with the horror genre required, and used human interaction to an extent (the use of human hands in certain frames).

We began designing our characters. I took a lot of inspiration from the character "Jack" from "Nightmare before Christmas" which can be seen in the skeleton like face and the long and thin limbs of the character. I decided to let the character emote purely through facial expression, and to not use voices. A lot of emotion can be portrayed through the eyes of a character.

Character Design Part 1

Character Design Part 2

A simple character design felt like a good idea seeing as none of our group have modeled with clay before. I created a wire framing to use for our character, and Anna and Adam began creating them using PlayDoh.

Unfortunately, the playdoh was far too heavy even with the wire supports. The only way we could make them stand was to thicken them to a point where they stopped looking like people.

Modelling

Modelling 2

Drew noticed we were having trouble and gave us some copper wiring which was much tougher to bend, but even still the characters would not stand on their own.

The result was the decision to scrap using playdoh.

Given the fact that we'd already restarted our idea before we needed to save some time to redeem ourselves, and I suggested using pre-made models for our animation.

A third storyboard followed.

Doll Story Board Part 1

Doll Story Board Part 2

This idea incorporates the use of some creepy dolls that my mother collects. At the time I was simply quickly creating an alternative story to get started on next week, after getting to my mother's home I found the dolls don't quite move the way I require them to. As such I head to a local toy store and found some small figurines with a vast amount of articulation points for us to use in our animation.

Next I moved onto storyboarding a new idea. I wanted to keep the premise quite simple and try to use an array of different camera shots. My aim was to create a smooth animation through the use of movement with the characters I would be using. We also wanted to use clay to a certain degree so we decided to use a simple "blob". As none of us has any real experience with clay at this point so we figured simplicity could be advantageous.

Story Board Attempt 1

The first story board I began for this idea seemed to be progressing far too quickly, so I decided to start it over to try to add a few more panels.

Story Board Attempt 2 Part1

Story Board Attempt 2 Part 2

This story board was then taken forward to create our first draft of our stop motion animation. We used the story board as a guideline, and at times we decided to improvise slightly.

We chose to use a piece of music that fit the actions within the animation rather than finding/recording voices for this piece as we wanted to tell the story purely through the actions.

The process has been long and arduous, but at least its taught use of many different aspects to consider in the future, such as scale, proportion, articulation etc.