Stop Motion Loops Assignment
This week’s assignment was to create stop motion loops using Stop Motion Studio, and exported as animated GIFs. Since I happen to have a small collection of bunny miniature characters, I decided to pick two of them to be photographed and featured in my assignment. Bellow are my two stop motion loops:
Reflection
Inspired by traditional Chinese festivals, I decided to create a loop of a bunny pounding medicine on the moon (based of the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival legend) and another loop of a bunny writing the character “spring” on a Chinese new years couplet.
For both of my loops, I photographed my bunny on a green screen background using Stop Motion Studio, exported the frames into Adobe Premiere to add in my background drawings (created with Procreate on my iPad), and then exported my final loop from Premiere. Since I am more familiar with using the Adobe products, I did most of the editing there instead of in Stop Motion Studio. However, I did find Stop Motion Studio useful in the sense that it allowed me to easily capture the frames and also showing the previous frame for me to compare to. I was also able to get a quick preview of my loop navigating through the frames I took in there.
Regarding the challenges I faced, I think the overall process of making these stop motion loops was fairly smooth and thus didn’t struggle hard on anything. I was just a little unfamiliar with some of the editing and adjustments settings in Stop Motion Studio, but was able to adjust the brightness of the frames and carry out the color collection I want in Adobe Premiere. The first Moon Festival bunny loop was pretty straightforward with a total of 4 frames repeating in the same position, but the second Chinese New Year Bunny took me a lot longer to create as I had to match the frames of the bunny with the location of the strokes in the post-production stage. I had a total of 29 bunny frames in this second loop (some shots were repeated and used multiple times), and also had to create 20+ frames of the “spring” character for the loop to show it being written out from start to finish.
With Kesiniya and Lucas, our animation group meeting went well and I generally received positive on my stop motion loops. They both seemed to be more interested in the Chinese New Year Bunny loop and I also shared my process on creating that loop. Both of them enjoyed watching my loops and like the cute bunny characters in each. In terms of insights, I feel like I learned a lot through my group members sharing their ideas and work in progresses, to think about and reflect on different people’s various takes on the assignment. I was definitely inspired by Kesiniya through her showing her work in progress, of both her inspiration and first drafts of her loops especially the cutting carrot and fruits. I also like how Lucas planned out an entire idea with a story line which he planned to work on. Even though I feel that it seemed to be fairly complicated to carry out especially with multiple different elements in the loop and leaves falling from the tree, I look forward to seeing his final product in class soon. Overall, I enjoyed working on this assignment and seeing other people’s works. In the future, I am definitely interested in trying to create stop motion loops of various styles and also working more on the digital side of animation creation.
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