Experiments using my chosen characters

Okay, so I realised jumping in and rushing to make my animation wasn't a good idea so this time I am taking my time to make sure I am making the right decisions! When I was doing researching for this project I looked into various animation techniques including stop motion as it looked like an interesting technique and something I haven't tried before.
When coming up with my idea and drawing my storyboards I did come to the conclusion that I should do my animation digitally as I thought my characters would look better made on illustrator than hand drawn and I wanted that 2D cartoon appeal like the work from Tado. I still think I should do my animation digitally however it doesn't hurt to try new things so I thought I would do a few small stop motion clips using my characters to see if making my animation is definitely the right decision.

I have made my bird and doughnut character out of felt fabric and toy stuffing. I decided that I would put the eyes on digitally as I thought I may want their expressions to change in the animations. The birds legs are separate from the body so I could make them move easier.

Here is my green screen! It is a piece of paper stuck on my cupboard!

Here is the first one I made- I initially filmed using a green screen so I could have a background however I really liked the movement of the shadows on the paper and thought it added to the organic look of the animation so I decided to do the animation with and without a background! I decided to make Doughy spin as in my storyboard he spins alot!


Fabric Doughy spinning from sarah chester on Vimeo.


Fabric Doughy spinning with background from sarah chester on Vimeo.

After this quick stop motion I decided to challenge myself a bit more and make the eyes change in my next stop motion. I also experimented a bit with type at the end, I went for a fun looking type to match the humour of the clip and also had a play with some of the type effects. I put offset on and character offset as well as making the text fade in and out. I think there is a lot going on with the text and I will make it more simplistic on my final animation but I wanted to see what basic effects I could create.


Don't look up! from sarah chester on Vimeo.

This one includes 2 cameras. I experimented with the zooming in and out. This stop motion was based on the last bit of the story board, I think it worked well in stop motion. I liked mixing digital with stop motion however think I will still make my final animation digitally as there are somethings I want to do that I think will look better done completely digitally.  By making these experiments I have learnt the basics of stop motion and I have learnt how to input my photographs into After Effects as a composition. I have also learnt how to use the camera and null object layers and how the use of parenting is needed to make the camera zoom in on the null object. Furthermore I tried out different effects of my type so these experiments have definitely been worthwhile.


Love is... FOOD from sarah chester on Vimeo.