Video & Sound Production - Final Project: Stop Motion

26.09.2023 - 05.12.2023 / Week 05 - Week 15
Ilhan Rayan bin Khairul Anwar / 0361205
Video & Sound Production / Bachelor of Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Final Project - Stop Motion

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LECTURES

Lecture Notes

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INSTRUCTIONS

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PRACTICAL

For our final project, we had to create a stop motion video on anything we wanted so long as it had a narrative and was 30 seconds - 1 minute long, depending on if you're working with a partner or not. I decided to work with my friend Alyssa since we both agreed to work together early on when we were introduced to the final project early into the semester.

We had originally planned to have our story be about isolation and envisioned using a lighthouse to represent that idea since we thought we needed to have a strong narrative with themes as that is what I was used to working with in high school. As we were discussing what materials we could use Alyssa brought up that she had a doll set known as "Sylvanian Families" which gave her the idea to make our story about a mother and her mischievous daughter as they bake a cake together. From there I drew basic storyboards for what we were going to do and we started planning for other props that we may need.

Figure 1.1: Storyboard 1, Week 12 (14/11/23)

Figure 1.2: Storyboard 2, Week 12 (14/11/23)

As we were looking at the props that came with the set, Alyssa brought up the idea that we could use clay for all the food since we were making a story about baking so I went out to buy modelling clay for us to use. 

Figure 1.3: Modelling Clay Used, Week 12 (19/11/23)

I bought extra white clay as well as the larger colour pack in case we wanted additional variety of colours if we needed them rather than trying to make them by combining other colours of clay together. Once we had all of our props, we filmed everything in one day so that we could have more time to edit, though we ran into some small issues while filming.

Figure 1.4: Original Set, Week 13 (24/11/23)

Originally we were just going to have our props be out in the open and used the wall behind the table as the background but I felt that it looked and felt terrible so I came up with the idea to use cardboard boxes as the walls and a large piece of light blue paper that we found to add some colour.

Figure 1.5: Updated Set, Week 13 (24/11/23)

A second issue that we ran into was the issue of a tripod as Alyssa was originally going to bring hers but her mother had to use it so we were left without one. I tried to salvage what I could find in the photo studio but I found nothing that worked, fortunately I came up with the idea to use my iPad to shoot everything since the case it has has a built in stand. Once we had everything set up, Alyssa filmed all of the shots as I had to fill in and do all of her work when she was sick for one of our other classes so she was repaying the favour, though I would often come in and help her with any framing and moving issues that she needed help with.

Because I had another event I had to deal with, Alyssa stayed on late to finish shooting while I was attending the event. Once she was finished, she packed everything up an handed me my iPad where I then exported all of our footage into my google drive. At first, I noticed that when I combined all our footage together it came to about three minutes in length which startled me as our time limit was 30 seconds per person, so 1 minute for our video. I went back into the app that we used and found out that we exported at 5 fps, so I exported it at 15 fps due to an issue when I exported at the recommended / required 24-25 fps. I noticed that when I exported it at 24-25 fps, the footage all together just barely passed thirty seconds which was far from the time limit we had to do so I had to make the sacrifice and use 15 fps which gave us 1 minute of footage all together, hence why the footage isn't as fast as expected.

Figure 2.1: Timeline Screenshot, Week 15 (4/10/23)

While I was editing the footage, I noticed some small accidental issues with our footage as some of the photos in the stop motion footage had bits of clay laying around on the floor which Alyssa forgot to clean up while shooting. Fortunately, I already came up with the solution as I used this tool for my previous project in Video & Sound Production.

Figure 2.2: Leftover clay in the frame, Week 13 (24/11/23)

Figure 2.3: Image overlayed onto footage, Week 15 (4/10/23)

What I had in mind was to take one frame where the piece of clay wasn't there and place it in the track directly above where the error is, from there I would use the crop effect to edit the image so that only the part without any clay was covering the section with clay. From there I also altered the brightness and contrast effect to make sure that the lighting of the overlayed photo matched the lighting of the main shot. Because of how fast the video is going and with there being a focus on the doll, I doubt anybody would actually notice the edit unless they take a closer look at the frame. 

Figure 2.4: Fixed Frame, Week 15 (4/10/23)

Once I solved those issues, I exported the footage and sent it to Alyssa for her to watch and see what sound effects we needed as I wanted her to have some part in the editing process as well.

Figure 2.4: SFX Guide Sheet, Week 15 (5/10/23)

Using a spreadsheet that she had made, I started searching for appropriate sound effects to download and use in the video. The two main websites that I used for this project were YouTube and freesound.org as I had used the latter in my sound dubbing exercise and YouTube for any additional sound effects or music that I wanted.

One of the main issues that I had with the sound effects was creating the footsteps as the way we filmed our stop motion made it so that the rabbit doll's movement were too fast for a normal human, so I had to improvise.

Figure 2.5: "Footsteps" SFX Screenshot, Week 15 (9/10/23)

What I did was I took a short snippet of a footstep sound effect that I downloaded and shortened it to match the speed of the doll's movement. From there I had to copy and paste the sound effect over and over so that it would play whenever the doll would move on screen. For the daughter I reused the same sound effect but I brought the pitch up slightly.

Once that issue was sorted I didn't have many other major issues as the sound effects that I used could either be found on freesound.org or on YouTube, though I did have to improve with some sound effects. One such example was the scene where she cuts the cake, I couldn't find any appropriate sound effects of a person cutting a cake so I used a sound effect of somebody cutting mozzarella since it sounded roughly similar to cutting a cake. Another example was when the daughter dumped chocolate into the bowl, for that I used a person stepping in mud to emulate the sound. Another scene was when the mother was decorating the cake and placed strawberries on the frosting, where I used the sounds of sticky notes being peeled and placed to emulate that effect.

As for the music and "dialogue," I used both the talking sounds and background music from the video game "Animal Crossing: New Leaf" which had a very cute and simplistic vibe that would have worked well with out video. The song that I had playing in the background can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlXopoG-ZrA, it's the song that plays when it turns 5 PM in game as the the time in game correlates to the real world time set on the device, and every hour has a different theme song that plays.

Figure 2.6: Finished Timeline Screenshot, Week 15 (10/10/23)

As seen in figure 2.6, I used five audio tracks for my video as there weren't as many sounds that were required compared to our audio dubbing exercise earlier in this module. A1 & A2 were for sound effects, A3 & A4 were for the footsteps and A5 was for the music.

Figure 2.7: Final Video, Week 15 (10/12/23)

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FEEDBACK

None

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REFLECTION

Experience

I had fun working on this project, I had done stop motion work in the past for classes in middle school so it was great being able to work on this kind of work again, though this time I had a much better understanding of the craft and held a much higher respect for the people who do this for a living. I've seen stop motion videos where the figures move at sixty frames per second and it looks as if they're moving on their own. I also realised I don't think I have the patience to work on stop motion as the amount of tinkering and careful movement of things would definitely make me frustrated after a while, especially if I mess something up. I really enjoyed the editing aspect of this more however, it was fun finding all the sound effects, editing them together, improvising sound effects and seeing everything come together in the end.

Observation

One thing that I noticed while shooting was how much effort goes into the details with stop motion, especially if there are multiple things moving at the same time which would require constant reminders and checks to make sure everything moves correctly only to redo it all over again for every frame, I can't imagine how much patience it must require to shoot stop motion in that level of quality, especially if it's a feature length film like Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio or Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Findings

I found that I am not suited for the stop motion business as I lack the delicacy and long term patience needed for this line of work, I do however realise I enjoy the task of editing which would most likely be of great use to me in the long run as I'm a majority shareholder of an upcoming film company so understanding how editing works would be of great use to me.