Video and Sound Production - Final Project: Stop Motion

20/10/2021 - 24/11/2021 / Week 9 - Week 14
Adriena Tan Yan Zi / 0351236
Video and Sound Production / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Final Project: Stop Motion

Instructions

Final Project: Stop-motion

In week 1, we were already told to start forming a group of 2 and start thinking about what kind of stop-motion do we want to go for and start looking up references to analyse the art style, story-telling direction and character design to get inspired before we start our project.

Requirements

Storyboard must be presented and get approval before the principle shoot. Final video is to be submitted in digital format:

Final video is to be submitted in digital format:

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Screen Resolution

1080p(Full HD), 16:9(Wide Screen)

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Frame Rate

24/25fps

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Field Option

Progressive Scan

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Audio Quality

48kHZ, 16-bits stereo

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Compression

H.264

References

Claymation from Guldies.

Under The Winter Sun | Award Winning Stop-motion Animated Short Film by Tom Bolles.

LEGO Fortnite (Stop Motion Animation/Brickfilm) by the action brick.

Proposal

After watching all the reference and finding inspiration, we decided to still go with the climate change theme and based our ideas on that. We planned out our ideas in Canva and refined the slide twice to make it fit our burning forest theme.

STOP-MOTION by Adriena Tan

The above is the refined slides to fir our concept as we have decided to go with the first idea.

Our story synopsis:

In the context of climate change, we’re creating a stop motion story that follows the daily life of a animals in a forest affected by rising temperatures. Show how the heat impacts the forest animals’ habitat, with dying trees and how the squirrel's resilience and its efforts to adapt and find solutions to survive in this changing environment. The rising temperature will be caused by the thinning of the ozon layer therefore exposure to the sun and causing the forest to burn due to the heat, eventually burning till no life form is left to survive in the forest.

The story sequence:

1st scene: One of the animals will walk into the frame and notices the new beautiful new forest they could possible call it home.

2nd scene: The will leave the scene to tell their friends about the new forest they discovered and would want to call in more friends to live peacefully once again in this new forest that seems out of the wonders of fairy tail with bright blue sky and big grown trees they could considered as habitat.

3rd scene: More and more herbivore animals will hear the words passing around and join the crowd explore their new home.

4th scene: When all the herbivore animals is settling in, there's bound to have a disastrous event which is part of the circle of life, where there will be balanced. The Carnivores joined and started hunting the animals and drive them deep into the forest.

5th scene: Finally the carnivore had most of the forest to themselves until a vehicle came in to explore the forest.

6th scene: The vehicle staying in the forest will let out many different harmful gases into the environment in the forest, the temperature near the forest will rise more than usual.

7th scene: Soon the vehicle will leave however the smoke and gases produced will remain, clouding up the whole forest.

8th scene: Eventually, the temperature will rise up so much that small little fires will start around the forest.

9th scene: It will get worse, the fire will get bigger clearing everything along it's way, the animals new habitat will be destroyed, along with it's species.

Our storyboard

Props Making and Filming

Here are some notes and images documenting Amelia and me creating props for our filming project. We worked on crafting the background entirely from scratch, primarily using cardboard and felt to ensure the texture is visible during filming. Initially, our plan was to create animals from clay, and we even attempted molding a squirrel as a prototype. However, the clay model proved to be unsustainable, falling apart after just a few movements. Consequently, we opted for realistic-looking animal toys instead. To streamline the filming process, we chose to use a stop-motion app that automatically combines the images for us.

Importing and editing

Here we're just importing the video from stopmotion to premiere pro so we could edit them in sections. I had an idea to add in the thinking bubbles and adding emojis to indicate the animals thoughts and conversation to indicate a clearly story-telling of the film.

I'm just adding more emojis to indicate the essential parts of the story so the viewer gets a clearer idea.

Then Amelia tole me that she wanted to try changing the tone and colour of the video in order to build up the vibe which looked cohesive to the story but the transition was a bit rough so I had an idea of adding dissolve transition to make it smoother from one colout to another.