Stop-Motion Character Animation

For this assignment, I collaborated with my classmates Edric Yamamoto and Catharina Sukiman to create a stop-motion animation of a character. Originally, we wanted to animate some Transformers solving a Rubik's cube, but when we realized how complicated that would be, we decided to look for a simpler idea.

We had to think about what other kinds of interesting "characters" we had access to. After sorting through many ideas, we thought about shoes. We realized we had easy access to little boy's shoes because of Edric's son. I also happened to wear my boy's sneakers that day. We decided to use Edric's shoes, his son's shoes, and my shoes to show the age of our character. With that concept, this is what we came up with:

In preparing our set, we tried our best to have good lighting with clean background.

We taped paper over the hanging lights to diffuse the lighting and to prevent it from creating a glare on the hard wood floor. These lights acted as fill lights. To the right of our set, we placed a tall lamp to be our key light. We set up a step ladder and clamped a plank of wood to it. We then clamped the iPad to the plank of wood, and in doing so, we created a large downshooter. With tape, we marked off the edges of the camera's view. We also used tape to mark the x- and y-axis positions of the shoes to make sure they didn't stray too far from their starting points.

We each took turns animating, directing, and taking pictures so that the workload was equal. When there were multiple characters on the set, we each took charge of one character each, and Edric's wife was kind enough to take the pictures for us while the three of us animated.

We shot parts of our animation on 4 frames per second and 6 frames per second. We animated the four walk cycles for each age we showed (little boy, boy, teenager, adult). We did our best to animate the contact, passing, up, and down positions for each walk cycle. In order to lift the shoes, Edric made wedges and blocks of varying heights out of cardboard and tape.

When we were done filming, Edric composited all the sequences together while Catharina and I tried to find music for our animation.

This was a very fun assignment to work on. Thank you for giving us this assignment, Professor Garcia! I found stop motion very enjoyable, and I plan to play around with some more stop motion in the future.