My Team: Danielle Almeida, Natalia Alvarez Silva, Kreesha Goinden and I
Through our first group experiment of stop motion in which we animated different shape transitions, I got to learn how to use Dragonframe and get used to different terminologies and types of stop motion animation. Using this knowledge and the sound files we were provided for our final outcome of this rotation, I came together with Natalia, Danielle and Kreesha to plan out our animation.
Out of the four files that were given, we were the most interested in the Cafe as it seemed like fun to explore the ways we could smoothly transition the wide variety of sounds in it.
First, we chose which section of the track we’d like to focus on, and listened to it a few more times. Jotting down the most prominent sounds, we got sounds of the door creaking, footsteps, dishes clanking together, a coffee grinder, banter, and music. We later narrowed it down further to just the latter four as the others were relatively insignificant.
Next was planning the transitions. After a few minutes of silent brainstorming of our own we bounced ideas off of each other on how we would show our assigned sound and thumbnailed then on our sketchbooks. I was tasked with the coffee grinder and saw that we had lots of dark-coloured paper freckled with lighter patterns and thought they could be used to to replicate the swirling of coffee in a cup. Later my team suggested that I could add some coffee beans grinding at the start and transition that to the liquid of the coffee, as Danielle who was before me planned to have small mouths coming out of a larger one to represent talking, and could smoothly transition to the many beans of my part.
My pieces consisted of ripped paper as coffee beans, the orange ones as the pre-grind beans and the darker ones for grinded beans. I also experimented with colouring in lighter paper with a black pen for a different kind of texture, but the idea didn’t end up working since the whites were too obvious. The liquid was made first by drawing the outlines of each frame on paper, switching between different papers per frame for the mixing effect.
Our final plan was to have each of our parts rotate around in a circle in 3D space. Whichever sound was the loudest or came on during the track, the corresponding part would transition to the front.
Capturing the stop motion itself was the more challenging part. We ran into a few practical issues, like how certain pieces would float in mid-air (my coffee beans, Natalia’s falling dishes) or how pieces would grow out of another (Danielle’s smaller mouths coming from a big one). Natalia decided to use clear tape and hand hers from above and Danielle decided to have the mouths attached to a thin pole blu-tack. We were a bit stuck on mine however, and I first thought of sticking the beans to the camera lens itself but realised that meant the lens wouldn’t focus and the blu-tack would be showing.
After asking for our tutor’s advice, we set up two poles supported by a stool on the table, and acetate sheet stuck on the front pole and Natalia’s tapes on the back pole. The acetate sheet both provided a base for my beans to be stuck on and allowed the camera to capture the animation behind them.
Our tutor also mentioned that our animation might be too ambitious for the amount of time we were given to work on it as we were essentially doing 4 whole cycles (1 cycle for each time someone’s part is at the front), and we had to work with a mix of replacement and displacement stop motion as well. From there, we prepared a backup plan in case things did not work out but kept trying to complete as much as we could. Despite our best efforts however, it just wasn’t possible to complete the full concept of the project.
Therefore we had to resort to our backup — since the first two cycles had the most variety of textures (coffee beans and music), we thought they were the best picks for representing the jumble of loud noises throughout the track, so we turned our focus to showing these two. In the end, we decided to have the part representing music cover the whole screen as it finishes its transition, and pull back like curtains to restart the cycle.
It was unfortunate to not get to see out full concept realised, but I thought we did alright with the resources and time given to us. Although I wished we had done more thorough planning in how we set up the pieces, it was also a good learning experience to have to solve issues on the spot that we could not have seen when planning, like the acetate sheet and tape reflecting light – they had to be held in a certain way to make the reflection disappear – as well as the rate at which we could finish a single cycle.