VIDEO AND SOUND PRODUCTION: FINAL PROJECT

Week 10 to Week 14

11/06/2023 – 15/07/2023 

Name: Joan Chiam Zi Woei 

Student ID: 0350211

Video and Sound Production

Final Project Video Stop Motion Video 

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Instructions:

Module Information Booklet

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Process

Stop Motion Ideation

For our final project, we needed to create a complete stop motion video based through taking shots on our phone/DSLR camera and edit it using Adobe After Effects and/or Premiere Pro. This is a groupwork of 2 so I teamed up with Benjamin to work on this project.

We didn't have an idea on what to do in the first place, but then we saw the new Spider-Man movie that was release recently so we decided to take that as an inspiration and recreate one of the famous scene from the first movie in the form of stop motion. We went through a lot of discussion on how to make a twist and how to make it work as the scene included a lot of background movement as well as the motion from the character itself. 

We came out with an idea with combination of cutting the character out to make it look more alive and also flipbook technique when to make the scene look as if it is actually moving in the form of stop motion. We also proposed our idea to the lecturer and got a positive feedback.

Collecting and creating the materials needed 

After getting approval for our idea, we started gathering the things needed for us to recreate the scene. First of all what we need is to observe the footage that we will be using so we gathered all the visuals that we need and added it into a google sheet.

Fig 1.1 Collected visual material

After that, we printed out the necessary scenes that we will be using. We cut out the character and background that we will be using and also drew highlights over them to emphasize the movement and details.

Fig 1.2 Background for stop motion

Fig 1.3 Character cut out for stop motion

After all the preparations are done, we moved on to shooting. We used Stop Motion Studio on mobile phone to shoot the stop motion.

Fig 1.4 Stop Motion Studio Process

It took a while to finish up shooting but it was not as hard in compare to preparation process so we did not struggle as much. In total, we've taken 152 shots. With all that done, we gathered all of the shots and move on to editing.

For the editing, instead of following the whole thing according to the original scene, we uses another background music as well as putting in our own sound effects. We also changed up some of the scenes so that it would not be identical towards the original scene. We also had to crop most of the footage as it was following the 2.35 : 1 aspect ratio. Finally with all that done, the stop motion video is finished.

Fig 1.5 Final stop motion video

Unfortunately, our video did not reach the 1 minute requirement but we've tried our best to extend it as much as we can and with the tight time schedule where we have to finish up our other assignment we had to give up on trying to add in more scene as it will take up more time which we do not have much.

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Reflection 

Creating stop motion animations has been very interesting and fulfilling experience. Throughout the process, I have gained a deeper appreciation for stop motion films. It took weeks of preparation, shooting and editing for me and my groupmate to create a stop motion video that is a little less than a minute while they were able to produce hours long films. The time and effort are unmeasurable and I respect the creators from the bottom of my heart. Overall, this task has allowed me to explore my develop technical skills, and gain a deeper understanding of the art of animation. I am happy to have learned and gained experience on creating stop motion animation.