animation week 2

Challenges arose as we started to work on our storyboards and shot listing, we felt that our characters were not facing real obstacles and that the plot had not been properly planned, causing it to become repetitive, and group members conflicting about how to schedule the shoot. to solve this problem I decided that rather than making group decisions i would publish a finalised shot list that was to be followed, the choice to have one decision maker planning the narrative was much better as there was no longer a butting of heads as we all piled in to make decisions. From this i learned that delegating roles at the start of a project based on peoples skills was extremely important and was something i will do from now on.

Another problem arose as we found that the classroom where we were shooting had extremely awkward lighting coming from many angles, causing the legs of tripod to cast unwanted shadows across our space. This is something i personally had not considered until today and so earned to work in locations that allowed complete control over key elements such as lighting. Solving this took a lot of time, we improvised by folding tables onto their side and then using them to block the light that came through, we also scrapped a traditional tripod and use a chair with rope and tape to hold the camera in place. Now that problems with the plot and lighting were solved we were able to shoot what we and our feedback group felt was a successful and funny piece.

Stop Motion worked well for us as it allowed us to work quickly and suited our paper cut out style of animation, using these simple 2D pieces meant we didn't have to worry about many complex aspects such as rigging our characters movements. However it was a struggle as moving each piece inch by inch was an extremely tedious and mind numbing experience. We learned that in order to keep focus one person must always supervise and discuss with the animator to ensure that they are not making mistakes.

Me and the group were extremely happy with the ending result, we felt it was very funny and kept the audience engaged, the only negative feedback being to ensure we have more control over lights next time as our improvisation did not cover it perfectly.