The first project of the year we were tasked to create a short stop motion film with our new classmates. The groups were created based on the time people went to bed, and the theme of our film was centred off two post it notes (the words written on it were something we liked and disliked). Our teacher showed us briefly other semesters examples of their stop motion film and also how to work with producing stop motion film using a special app.
3 out of 4 members of my group have had prior experience with stop motion films before. I have done it quite a lot when I was younger but never with clay as a medium. The two key symbols we had to implement into our film from the post it notes were sushi (the thing we liked) and macbooks (the thing we disliked). As a group we discussed how we wanted the film to go about, and under further agreement we decided to create our storyboard.
Storyboard
Our teacher told us creating a storyboard would not only guide us clearer into our video production but to also stay organised and focused on the objective of the film. Our storyboard consisted of 8 frames in total and followed the life of a woman and a blue cat enjoying a night in with sushi and getting electrocuted by a macbook.
Character and setting creation
The clay we were given and the other material provided were very vibrant in colour so we aimed for an 80s sort of themed setting. Initially our storyboard only had a sofa, a small table and of course the two characters, but we had time to create extra accessories to give the setting more life. One of my team members found an already made woman but decided to add some extra features and clean her up a bit. But we did not have a cat and I wanted to create the cat myself because I knew I could make a good one. When I was younger I was obsessed with creating miniature versions of foods and other things in polymer clay and used my knowledge to make somewhat of a realistic but cartoon-like cat. I gave the cat blue fur to further create that cartoon like look, but also create another body of the cat into a sitting fat cat from eating all the sushi. For the tail, legs, and head I used small pieces of wood to give more stability to the cat but also the option for us to move the cat and its individual pieces without breaking.
Shooting
Shooting the stop motion film in general went with ease but some problems we ran into was that our background of the wall and floor was extremely unstable and kept moving around. We only really started to realise this half way through the film and decided to prop tape and other objects against it to stop it from moving. We would have started from scratch if we had the time, but due to the time constraints we ran along with it.
Editing
I edited the short film in imovie as it was the only editing software I have had experience in. The only editing aspect to it was overlaying sound effects and matching it up to the actions in the film. I realised when presenting that there was just too much sound going on at once and it became overwhelming.
Overall this was a great project not only to practise our stop motion skills and creating props and characters for the film but to also get to know my new classmates. There were minor things that could’ve been improved but due to the time frame we decided not to pursue it. Some of those things included more unique and different film shots instead of just the same one in front of the couch. And in terms of editing with the sound, perhaps to tone down on the background sounds and make it more realistic to better fit the story line.
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