Friday, 28 September 2012

Stop motion

Stop Motion is a technological technique used in film and the visual arts in order to manipulate objects to appear moving on their own using still, divided frames combined into a pattern.
My group and I thought that it would be really effective and a nice touch to use this in our own video. First we researched examples of videos that incorporate this.




The objects are moved slowly in a gradual development between the individually photographed/filmed frames, creating the illusion of movement. This looks fantastic when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence creating an almost animated touch to the video. 

We decided it would be well suited to use to stop motion in the very beginning, where there is whistling and a ukulele playing. This transports the viewer from fantasy to reality as we will form a transition at that point fowards. We have created a draft of the stop motion. Our idea was to have a sun gradually moving along the horizon through white, puffy clouds above green landscape. In our free time, we constructed a mock up and cut and glued these components using coloured paper. We then used our iPhone 4 to take separate pictures whilst readjusting the sun continuously. Then, we uploaded our still frames onto our saved file on Adobe for the video, and created a 10-15 second sequence of the gradual stop motion. I found this such an artistic and creative way to introduce the video. This has sprouted many other ideas and possible effects that we will use in the production process. 



Below is an example of the first frame used in our stop motion experiment: