Evaluation of Our Stop-Motion Animation...

Our stop-motion animation was about bulling and how you shouldn't let anyone make you feel small and helpless. Also, by speaking out and confronting bullies you grow as a person, shown in Timmy growing in size. This was discussed in further detail in the previous post.  

Previous characters

The first problem that came to our attention is our previous designs for the characters had to be reworked as they looked quite strange and did not have the same effect when created by myself and Cari so it was decided that Ceri would take over the designs and create all the characters needed and the tree. During this I worked out the script with input from the other two about how it sounded and tried to get a feel for the characters. When starting out in creating our animation Ceri was to take the photographs while I was to move the characters. Cari had used Audacity and was most familiar with the software so it was decided that she would work out the music and voices while we were working on the animation. 

Characters used

In the beginning before we started taking the pictures we had issues with the colour as the meadow in the background was suppose to be green however in the pictures it was a range of colours with the background being pink at one point. We eventually managed to get it to the right colour by placing a lamp to shine on the scene and changing the colour focus. Strangely it was more green after we lessened its affect. 

In my personal experience the main difficulty was remembering to move everything that needed to before the picture, with remembering to move the ball in the background as well as the other movements of the characters and there were a few occasions were retakes were needed when it was noticed the ball had stopped moving half-way through a roll when it wasn't suppose to. Another issue was the screen kept moving slightly and was extremely difficult in getting it back to its place. 

Additionally we had difficulty with the audio; the meadow sounds, sad music and the song Happy by Pharrell were kept however we took out others such as the danger music as we felt it was too mismatched and it was better to keep the music to a minimal so as not to lose the message of the animation. Furthermore, the audio would then not transfer from one computer to the other which had the animation this was eventually figured out using the internet.  

While filming the animation we noticed the lighting kept changing and could not figure out as to why so we were unable to stop it. Though we used the change to create the effect of the weather with clouds potentially passing across the sun. Another problem we found was that our script was too long and after recorded it did not match properly to the animation. Therefore the script went through some major changes though we kept the same basis just shortened parts to keep it in line with the rest of the animation.See previous post for the full planned script. 

We also found it difficult to reach the two minute mark as after we finished the animation we discovered that it was shorter than expected and without completely reworking the entire animation there wasn't much we were able to do in the time we had available. 

Below is our complete animation...

Overall I am pleased with how this animation turned out despite the problems as seen above. However, if I was to do it again I would take more time in making the animation and experimenting with more complex techniques to broaden my abilities.