Animation - Skeleton Walk

Continuing further into the exploration of lighting and darker atmospheres, I created a short scene involving a skeleton walking down a corridor. With the factory scene, the LEDs were nice to work with but I felt needed something more. After looking at Corpse Bride, they also added green lights in addition to the red in one scene. I didn’t have any green lights so went with a standard torch which helped to add more depth to the scene; however I only used this for brief flashes.

I chose to animate an undead character and try to utilise the quality of movement you get with stop motion animation and use this to my advantage to create a stylised jerky walk. It turned out okay but I think this would benefit from a better character model.

Animation - Factory Scene

From observing other animated movies, I wanted to explore the use of lighting in my animations. Taking some influence from my earlier exploration into machinery and clockwork parts, I wanted to create a factory scene. I wanted to use stop motion here to get the quality of motion often associated with the medium. The imperfect consistency in movements is a natural product of the process, and this gave the machinery a slightly mechanical movement to it which I liked. I used a set of Red LEDs which I also moved and animated in each frame. The light that hit off the walls and machine parts quite well for the visual effect I wanted to achieve.

Skills Development

Before the start of this project, during the summer, I was taking early steps to prepare with my honours project. I wanted to include stop motion animation in the project but did not know how or what I’d be looking at.

I worked on a stop motion animation project on the side during the summer and during the first several weeks of the semester. Although the work I created for this project was not applicable to the honours project, without that work, the honours year research project would probably not be where it is today. I do consider the skills developed to be applicable to this project.

The side project involved studying the use of cinematography and editing techniques by re-creating existing media in stop motion animation using Lego bricks. I chose to look at a trailer for the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice movie, out of personal preference and as something that contained a lot of challenging sequences.

Through creating various shots, I learnt how to translate real world filmmaking techniques into something practically achievable through stop motion. Stop motion has its limitations but working with them gives those animations a certain charm.

Some techniques I tried out are:

Lighting

Using additional lights to add visual effects such as lightning or explosions.

Adding lights to illuminate certain objects in a scene.

Camera Movement

Following the path of action in a character, the camera “lags” behind the movement by a frame or two to feel more natural, as if a person was filming in real time.

Masking

Removing something in post production to make it look like something is flying or in the air during an action. By keeping the flying object as close to its actual position in the scene, the lighting on that object will keep it feeling real within a scene. Artificial shadows can be added to emphasise this.

Backgrounds

Avoiding digital backgrounds where possible. The use of printed backgrounds in this scene actually gave it a more charming quality to the animation, emphasising the physicality of the real world set.