Stop Motion is hard…but I still love it.

From this point on, Monday 13th - Sunday 19th will officially be regarded as one of my most stressful weeks as I was convinced I was cursed to not complete any of my work, due to technical malfunctions and minor illness.

Dragonframe is a stop motion software that the university uses, and I do love it compared to any other stop motion software out there, but this week every single computer that had Dragonframe on it malfunctioned whenever I tried to import images of a face set. Clearly I did something wrong in the making of the images but can you blame me into thinking that I was cursed?! So this week I had to do some of my stop motion work manually and alter the images in Photoshop before trying to import them on Dragonframe again.

The videos above show what I filmed this week, the green screen one being made manually, and the other from what I managed to make on Dragonframe. These are some paper plane tests for my group title sequence project, where for a small part of the sequence, we would show a stop motion paper airplane over a map of the world.

I've always preferred stop motion over any other animation technique  as it requires you to get physical and create the sets and characters! Nowadays, it's the only kind of animated film where not everything on screen is done on computers, which gives the audience some real and often breathtaking visuals. A lot of animators however, while appreciating stop motion, would choose not to go into it because there's no money in the market. If you want a guaranteed job, 3D is really the way to go. Even films like Kubo and the Two Strings or The Lego Batman Movie both have stop motion and CG elements in them to create some outstanding animation, but in the end it still looks more like CG than stop motion. It's now become uncommon to see a full stop motion movie (PS. Defiantly go and see Kubo and Lego Batman, they are amazing movies!).

I always knew that if I were to make my own stop motion film, it'll be tough but also fun at the same time. This week was the first time I realised that production will not always go so smoothly, and that setbacks will ensue and cause you to loose track of time, causing the entire process to be even harder. I imagine that huge animation studios also have to deal with weeks like this during production, when everything just goes wrong and you have no choice but to take a break.

I almost broke down this week when I didn't get my work done, but it still doesn't take away how much I like doing stop motion. The video with the green screen showed the first time I tried moving the camera and the puppet at the same time, to create the illusion of zooming out to show the bigger picture! The fact that I at least managed to learn one new thing is still good! Creating something you like is at times painful but to you it's a lot of fun, so if everything goes wrong, there's no shame in taking a small break to claim your sanity back before you keep going.