Stop motion film

Evaluation

We were given the task of creating a stop motion film as part of our skills development. We were allowed to select what medium we wanted to use to create it, and ended up selecting Lego. We began by planning out the plot line and characters, taking inspiration from Lego pieces that our class created. Once we had a full script, we created the film over many days. Most of us helped with the visual aspect (moving the Lego figures, taking the photos, etc.) whilst some of the others found music and sound effects. We found the process to be rather challenging as each movement had to be very small and precise to maintain the continuity and make the movements smooth and fluid. This was difficult as the characters often fell over, and we ended up using blu-tac to hold them in place. It was also useful to achieve effects such as falling, because it allowed the characters' movements to be more gradual. The 'set' pieces also kept moving ever so slightly when we tried to just adjust the characters, and it's unfortunately noticeable in the final film. Also, as we were shooting over multiple weeks, the set had to be moved out of the way when other classes were using that room. We had to use the pictures we'd taken to figure out exactly where each character and set piece had to go, for continuity's sake. We also weren't sure how many shots needed to be taken during the dialogue sections so the same couple of pictures are used multiple times to fit how long the lines are. It causes these parts to appear rather jerky and odd, with the obvious switching backwards and forwards, which is rather distracting. Furthermore, quite a few of the shots are slightly out of focus. This is because the camera we used needed to be significantly far from the subject to be in focus, but we didn't fully figure this out until later in the process. We didn't have time to reshoot everything so we had to leave some sections which are slightly blurry.

We recorded the dialogue later on in the process so as many of us were helping with the shots as possible. We used a separate room to do the voice acting so there wouldn't be any background noise and the audio would be as clean and high quality as possible. I was one of the voice actors and we each recorded our dialogue a couple of times, so we'd have multiple takes to choose from, and because we were unsure of how much distance to have between ourselves and the microphone. This all went fairly smoothly as we had the script in front of us to ensure we'd get our lines correct, and we all figured out previously how we wanted our characters to sound. I hadn't really had much voice acting experience before this, so I enjoyed learning about a new performance medium and expanding upon my acting skills. 

Overall, this project was one of the more difficult ones we'd been given because none of us had much experience doing stop motion. However, this allowed us to develop our skills together and learn along the way. We all helped one another in all aspects of the film's creation and took it in turns to try out different roles. Though this isn't something I'll likely try again in the future (except perhaps the voice acting part), I mainly enjoyed it, even though it got stressful at times. If we were to do a project like this again, I think we would need to spend more time planning everything out shot by shot and working more collaboratively on the editing so the final product would be as good as possible.