THE PRESENTATION

THE 20% TIME SPEECH

20% Time Speech: Learning the Art of Stop-Motion:

Was there ever a time in your life as a kid when you wished your toys would come to life? For my 20% Time Project, I wanted to challenge this question. Could it possibly be done? Well first of all, it is impossible for toys to literally come to life, but I got pretty close. How, you may ask? Magic – the magic of stop-motion.

Now, before I go on any further, what exactly is stop-motion? Simply put, it’s one of the many types of techniques used to create animations. It’s made by moving objects at small increments individually at a time to create an illusion that it is actually moving when the pictures are played consecutively. Ok, that must’ve sounded really confusing. Basically, you take a picture of an object, move it a little, take another picture, and so on. When you play all these pictures consecutively in rapid speed, the object looks like it is moving.

So, stop-motion is used to create all sorts of films, ranging from short animations (what I’m going to show you today) to commercials, advertisements, and even full movies, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and Paranorman. There are many others, of, course, but I’d like to share with you what I’ve accomplished during past 6 months in the very limited time I have with you today.

For the first 3 months-or-so, I’ve been working on learning how to create stop-motions. This included learning various lighting positions, animation techniques, and camera movement. During this time, I created several different test footages to get hands-on experience, and learned new things along the way from trail-and-error. I was fascinated after learning how complex making stop-motion actually was, and was finally ready to attempt my own short little animation.

The first thing to do was to come up with an idea. It took a while, but I thought it’d be really cool if it could have something to do with the Rubik’s Cube, since that’s not something you see every day, is it?. From then on, I sketched out the script for the animation, and then went right along to shooting the images.

Of course, no accomplishments come without obstacles and mistakes. There were many challenges I faced during the course of making my animation – most of them attacked me before I even got started because they mostly all had to do with having no decent equipment. For example, it was pretty embarrassing when I finally realized that my cheap camera doesn’t work properly when it comes to making stop-motion. Luckily, at that time, my parents were finally considering buying me a brand new camera, so I ended up working with a Canon EOS Rebel T5i – currently the newest and best model of the canon rebel series. Basically, a pretty advanced camera! But, I mean, probably the hardest challenge I’ve faced were the effects of procrastinating. And procrastinating, especially when it comes to stop-motion, can lead up to very… difficult times.

Why? Here is the one thing that I want to point out to you today: creating stop-motion animations take time – a LONG time, too much time in my opinion. Here’s an easy comparison to demonstrate how long it creating them are: it takes about roughly one hour of work to produce 10 seconds of an animation. That’s 1 hour of straight continuous work, btw. So for instance, if you want to create a 1 minute animation, you can assume it’ll take at least 6 hours of work.

Anyways, I’m proud of how my animation turned out. It took a long time – about 8 hours of shooting, and 2 hours of additional editing. Though, I’m going to be real honest with you now; sometimes, I lost so much motivation from the time and effort it took that I almost wanted to quit. But don’t get me wrong here, I really enjoyed the process. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t, since I accomplished my goal of creating my short animation, which I will show to you now.

There are still things I'd like to learn, but I think I've mastered the basics for now. Although it took a lot of effort, I think it was worth it. Overall, this project was a great experience, and I hope you can agree with me when I say that I made the toys come to life... Thank you.

The Final Animation

STEPS TOWARD THE FINAL GOAL

First of all, I want to apologize for the inactivity of the past two months. Completing the "end-of-the-year" animation in such a short time cost me lots of my undivided attention. On the bright side, it's complete! Therefore, I will share all the steps that was taken in order to accomplish this goal - from the spark of its idea to the last image shot.

1). THE IDEA
I started getting really worried when I realized how close it was to the end of the year, and I still didn't have the slightest clue of what my animation was even going to be about. I started searching through the web for some clues, but no luck. So I went to the attic, and discovered a box full of old toys. Then an idea was born.

2). THE SCRIPT
Once I got the idea, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of notebook paper. It was finally time to get the gears turning and come up with the story for the animation. For a few days, I just sketched out the story into a comic to get a good idea of what the final animation would look like. It was then time to shoot the images.

3). THE SET
Since I now knew what the animation would look like, I quickly began building the set, or the background, of the animation. The complete set mainly consisted of a room filled with toys, so I got right to work. Most of the entire set was finished within a couple of minutes.

4). CAPTURING THE IMAGES
Capturing the images was very time consuming; it took me about a total of 10 hours to completely finish the animation, shooting an hour for 10 days. Since stop-motions must be taken during the night, it took me quite a while to finish.

5). EDITING THE ANIMATION
After finishing taking all the pictures, the only thing left to do was compile them into a movie, and add audio and music. It wasn't hard, but it took a decent amount of time.

Alas, I'm done with my animation, but there are still many things left to do. I currently finished my speech for my presentation, and will now start practicing speaking in front of many people. I guess I feel a bit... apprehensive. So many things could go wrong! I'm now working on my presentation board, although I literally have no idea what  it's going to look like.

So, yeah! See ya next Friday!

Learning the Art of Stop-Motion: Lesson 6

2.DIMENSIONAL -vs- 3.DIMENSIONAL

Stop-motion can be made in both 2-D and 3-D. Most stop-motion animations are made in 2-D; individual pictures are drawn by hand or computer and played repeatedly to create an animation. Most stop-motion animations you see in actual movie-theater movies are made in 2-D, but technically, stop-motion refers to the movement of 3-D objects. Shooting 3-D is much more efficient and easy since animating them requires to just move the object being animated itself. 2-D is much harder since you have to keep drawing individual pictures (mostly the exact same picture, just a little different between the others) to keep the animation in sequence.

Individual Images for 2-D Stop-Motion

Shooting 3-D Stop-Motion

Learning the Art of Stop-Motion: Lesson 5

EASE IN, EASE OUT

OK... So we kind of got the hang of toggling a camera now; let's get into learning about animation techniques. All movement has an ease in, ease out motion. Now, what does that mean, you ask?

All movement starts by moving real slow, gets faster and faster, fastest during the middle of the movement, and then begins to move slower again until the movement reaches a complete stop. This is what animators call ease in (starts slow and gets faster) and ease out (starts fast and gets slower).

Here is a quick diagram of how ease in, ease out motion works:

The main goal of this animation is to depict the movement of a penny rolling from the left to the right side of the screen. Notice how it shows the penny moving slowly at first, fastest during the middle, and slows down again during the end.

Lots of animators tend not to do this, and that results in movement that have a "robotic moving" feel, meaning there is no precise motion.

Learning the Art of Stop-Motion: Lesson 4

CAMERA MOVEMENT

Camera movement is essential in order to make a great animation.
Well, what is camera movement? Simply put, camera movement is basically everything that has to do with the movement of the camera - its position, angle, field of view, focus, you name it. It is one of the most expressive tools available in film because it creates illusions that help make the viewer feel like they're actually in the movie.

Think about it! How boring would a movie be if the camera is just perfectly still? (Meaning it doesn't move at all) Say that the very still movie is still yet so well-made that the viewer is still watching. I doubt that they would want to watch it again. Why? Well, you can say that camera movement is a gateway between the audience's world, and the movie's world. This gate is kept blocked without any camera movement, so why would anyone bother to watch it again?

Here's a simple demonstration that you might understand  a little bit better.
The following are two of the exact same animation of  a simple character jumping off a rock. The first video is the raw footage, and the second is the video where I edited camera movement into them.

WILL BE POSTED LATER... Be Patient :)

So, what do you think? How does camera movement affect an animation? The answer should be pretty simple...
You probably now understand what camera movement is, and why they're pretty much essential in making a great stop-motion film.

So, there are 4 most basic types of camera movement:
~Zoom: The camera simply zooms in or out of the scene. Usually used when there's little to no action; Zoom will probably used when characters are having a quite lame conversation.
~Pan: The position of the camera is kept the same, but it rotates side-side or top-bottom in one plane (only rotates around one axis).
~Dolly: Basically the opposite of Pan; the rotation is kept the same, but the position moves side-side or top-bottom in one plane (only moves on one line).
~Track/Shaky Cam: The position of the camera stays the same, but the rotation moves according with the action, character, etc. in multiple planes (rotates around infinite axis).