Week 6 - Stop Motion Animation
Looking at the principles and the examples, the initial feeling is that this is totally intuitive and should be easy, but we faced lots of challenges that we were not expecting. We decided to work with drawings on paper and have multiple components of our objects drawn separately so that we could animate them without drawing the whole object again. The whole process was so surgical and you had to be so precise with how you handled the little pieces of paper, one little accidental nodge and the whole thing falls apart. On top of that another challenge was to calculate how many frames we needed to shoot in order to have some parts of our animation slow down to create a feeling of easing in/out. Lighting was another thing we had to be careful about, right when we were about to be done with our project something changed the lighting. I couldn't tell whether it was the sun setting or the room lights changing or the battery on our LED light kit draining but our scene turned more yellow. So we had to readjust the light and make it more blue to match the previous frames but no matter how hard we tried there was still a noticable differece.
We tried to take into consideration the 12 principles as much as we could in our project. Slowing in and slowing out was the primary one, we tried to shoot more frames with less change in the beginning of our animation then make changes in each frame to make them faster captured more frames for the ending. Also as a secondary action, we thought we could draw cat furs reacting to the wind from the fan.
The result of our first attempt was not what we had anticipated. The drawing looks so uncanny and everything happens at the same speed with no secondary action.
My teammate then drew all the parts again on her iPad. Our second attempt already looked much better than our first one.
— Nima Niazi