The Beginning of Stop Motion

Today was the first day we were sitting down and starting the stop motion animation process, our brief for this week was to create a walk cycle using Replacement technique, this is an animation technique quite commonly used an example of which is the animated childrens program Pingu. Replacement means using many different models each posed in a different way to make the animation. Our group found this quite challenging as we had 6 models but to do a walk cycle smoothly by replacement we would have liked to have had 16 different poses. As a result we had to reposition certain models to get the extra positions and this was more time consuming when we would have been better re-posing one model again and again. This is a more commonly known stop motion technique, which we used in our later animations the break dance and the Zoommbiieesss animation that we started to make to test our ability to move six characters per frame.

This was the group walk cycle

Evil mastermind claire Manson is responsible for this one, The rest of the group offered camera and lighting support and when it came to the more complex jump movements help with the very technical aspect of rigging the model in mid air with bits of Tom Doyle's hair.

Finally this is the first two scenes of our "feature length" Zombie epic, we went for a very very staggering approach when it came to making the zombies walk or rather shuffle at high speeds. Over the course of the day we learnt some valuable lessons about lighting (and how to avoid the random changing in lighting colour demonstrated in the walk cycle), we learnt a lot of points that will be taken into account when making our own armatures for example making them big enough to be easily manipulated and not too fiddly.