Stop Motion Pixilation

For my second Stop Motion task, I was asked to work in a group and to create any animation, as long as it followed the Stop Motion style. First our group sat down and brainstormed the different ideas that could be made using the Stop Motion technique. We finally decided upon using a live actor which falls into the particular category of Pixilation; where actors are used as a frame by frame subject in animation.

We decided upon a simple idea of food and drink, however we wanted the animation to be a bit more interesting than just that, so we came up with the idea of using found objects to create "The lunch"

This was a test at using marbles to create the effect of rising water, this first attempt wasnt a success as the the marbles were not believable as water, so we did another test where we placed the marbles in the cup in a specific order, to create a kind off spiral effect, to giver the impression of flowing water.

This was the result, we also made sure that the teabag followed the spiral patter to make the animation more believable.

One of the principles of Animation we felt was important to make this piece of stop motion animation was the timing. We felt that it was important not to go to fast when animating, as this is easily done, however not to go too slow as well. We experimented by taking frames at different speeds, and the actor also acted at different paces. We planned to have the animation look realistic enough, however not to look so smooth so that it looks like it could have been just been recorded on camera. We wanted that very slightly choppy stop motion effect. 

Another animation principle that we applied to this animation was "slow in and slow out", for instance in the scenes where we chopped up food, we edited this by removing specific frames to create the impression that when the actor went to cut through the food, it accelerated, and then when he brought the knife back up, before going to chop again we added more frames to slow it down. By doing this we made chopping action look a lot less robotic, and more naturalistic. 

We did also use exaggeration in the animation, although this is very quickly seem, we do this when the cow is squeezed in order to produce milk, a close up shot is seen of the cows face, and his eyes quickly become much larger, to show that the cow is extremely shocked and surprised. Again with this particular stop motion, there wasn't really anything we could do to incorporate squash and stretch as this was pixilation.