I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. It’s honestly not often in the professional world that you get to practice something like stop-motion animation, so having the chance to work on it here was really exciting.
I had done a little sketch a while ago when I was trying to think up a creature for another project.
I was hoping to find a reason to make him move at some point, and interacting with a 3d space seemed like a great idea. I talked with James after class, and we came up with the idea that he could kick a table and have some liquid fall into one of his suction arms. I would do the hand-drawn elements, he would do some of the post-production work, and we would both film the stop-motion side.
So step one was for me to get to work on the hand-drawn side.
It was a pretty cozy weekend in my apartment making the 50 drawings necessary for the movements that we wanted. Honestly, after spending so much time in front of a screen, sketching on paper was a nice change of pace.
I have a little make-shift light box at home made out of an art box and some remote controlled puck lights, and I have a camera on a stand hooked up to Dragonframe, which I use as a pencil-test machine.
After a weekend full of podcasts and snack food, I had the animation at a place where I was satisfied.
It was time to take the drawings and combine them with the real world in Dragonframe.
We set up in the workshop with a camera mounted on a bar between two tripods. We filled up a coffee cup with brown play-doh to serve as our coffee, and got to work.
Of course, that wasn’t all. We timed things out in After Effects, and James put together the sound in Premiere.