Stop Motion Animation

Today in our animation workshop we were set the task of creating a short stop motion sequence in groups of 4.

The first step for this was to decide on our scene and create a storyboard. 
We decided to use two simple characters, which we named Bob and Sarah. Bob would be walking down the street, and would spot Sarah walking from the opposite direction. He would then trip over a misplaced banana skin on the pavement, and be so embarrassed that the ground would swallow him up (taking the classic expression into the literal sense).

Once we had created our storyboard, we decided on different roles for each member of our group. My role was to design and create the two characters of Bob and Sarah. I made a first sketch of both characters before deciding on how to make them moveable. 

From these sketches I drew the characters again, with separated and extra body parts to enable them to 'walk' and 'change expressions' within our stop motion animation sequence.

While this had been my role, the rest of my group had set about creating the set and background for our characters to become animated in.

We decided to use Ieva's phone as our camera, as it was small but the photos were of good enough quality, and we only needed something simple for this task. We taped it to the top of a chair, as this gave us an idea angle to shoot from, and the camera was still supported in the same position for each different frame.

Between each shot taken we would move the characters to the next desired position, for example we would slightly move each of their legs between shots to create the motion of walking. We used blu tac to keep their limbs in place, which also allowed us to easily move them into a different position after the shot had been taken.