Explorations

Explorations

I’ve always been interested in stop motion, something I wanted to learn. Was able to learn how to make simple stop motion in animation this year, but I wanted to do more in stop motion. This led me to researching the multiple styles of stop motion, and learning how to use the motion controller.

My Research

My research for the different styles of stop motion was relatively quick, since the list is quite short. Somethings that I found interesting, was the fact that stop motion doesn’t have to be 3D. Cut out animation utilizes paper cut out into different shapes to create characters, and you would arrange the pieces in different ways to animate. Also the two most common styles of 3D stop motion, Clay-mation and Puppet, both use an armature. An armature is the skeleton of your character, and is the reason puppets can hold poses in the first place. If you armature breaks, like mine did, then you will have some major problems. Now that I was finished with my puppet, I was ready to move on to the motion controller.

Animating

Learning how to set up and use a camera motion controller was possibly the coolest and most frustrating process that I have experienced. A motion controller, is device consisting of multiple servos that can precisely control the movement of the camera. This grants animators the ability to create complex shots in stop motion. And the Motion controller that we have at freestyle, is pretty awesome. It consists of three different products, Camera slider, Omnihead, and Lens drive, bolted onto one another. Ditogear, the company who made our motion controller, designed their products to be modular with one another. That is pretty convenient because each device is self sufficient, but this makes cable management an absolute nightmare. The set up, is quite possibly the worst thing in the history of everything ever. My animation teacher, Mrs. Copete told me that the printed instructions are, “Worse than Ikea.” and they were. All instructions were vague telling you the only minimum of required information at all times. The diagram had two examples of different setups on the same page without informing the reader about. And these instructions were only the camera slider, because the products are sold separately!

Post Production

Add the images that I need for this part of my process talk about some other stuffs and we good