Stop Motioning The Characters- My Process

I have realised that although I have displayed my tester animations and explored how the blue screen was going to work  I haven't really talked about the stop motion process that I undertook. My tester animations and the colour keying experiments helped me understand how everything was going to work on a larger scale and clarified some of the issues that I would need to rectify in order to ensure that everything went smoothly.

My Studio Set- Up 
In order to maintain consistency within my photographs it was imperative that my studio remain in place. In order to do this I placed green tape on the carpet around the feet so I would always know where the lights and tripod would need to stand. Not only did this make my set-up time faster it also meant that I could move the lights out of the way when I wasn't using them.

As previously mentioned the use of soft boxes and a cable release helped to fully control my lighting which when used with specific camera settings generated well lit and clean photographs.

In order to stop the background from moving I used a combination of tape and heavy books around the edges to keep it still- this was actually very handy because it meant that I could lean across the paper to move my characters without moving the base.

Stop Motioning The Characters

After completing my tester animations I came to the conclusion that I didn't have to move my characters across the frame (since it would not help when it came to timing my motion to the song- especially if I wanted to generate longer scenes) so instead I decided to stop motion the movement of my animals by keeping them on the spot. This generated the idea of walking and it would mean that I could then key frame position them across my backgrounds and therefore determine their timing. Doing it this way meant that my characters retained their handmade - jerky quirky movements but were helped by digital means to narrate the song.

For each of my characters I stop motioned them walking on the spot whilst playing their respective instruments and then sitting down playing their instruments. I also experimented with some other poses to include some variety and made sure to flag the change in pose before shooting so I could keep them all in order.

Fox

All in all it took about a week to stop motion all of my different characters - the fox took the longest (because he was the first character and I had yet to find my rhythm) as did the moose - because I had two extra lefts to worry about. Having said that once a routine was established it took less time than I thought it was going to.