Video & Sound Production - Final Project

9 June 2023 - 14 July 2023 / Week 10 - Week 15
Sim Jia Min 0349784
Video & Sound Production / Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media / Taylor's University
Final Project: Stop Motion

---

INSTRUCTIONS (MIB)

---

Quick Link

Exercises

Project 1

Project 2

Final Project: Stop Motion

Figure 1.1: Title, brief story idea, and character planning

For the character, my groupmate Sarah already has created her own original character, Emilio the mouse, and Loberto the lobster, so we decided to use them as our characters for our stop motion project. 

Figure 1.2: Storyboard

The making of the character

For the characters, we decided to use clay as the material, as we think that clay is quite flexible when it comes to changing the body gesture and facial expressions. 

Figure 1.3: The mouse character: Emilio

Figure 1.4: The lobster character: Loberto

The set design

We use shoe boxes for the set, and decorated it with colour papers and small props. We also handmade some small props by reusing some materials that we have.

Figure 1.5: Making wallpaper

Figure 1.6: Handmade some small props to design the room

Figure 1.7: Final look of Emilio's room

Figure 1.8: The living room, props are the childhood toys provided by my groupmate Sarah

Figure 1.9: The living room

Figure 2.1: Final set design (room and living room)

The lighting setup in photography studio

Figure 2.2: The lighting setup

As the story setting is nighttime, so we use a dark background, cold lighting at the back as moonlight, and warm lighting at the front as the main lighting that lights up the rooms.

Behind-the-scene of making stop motion
We use phone camera to shoot all the scenes.

Figure 2.3: Speed up video 1

Figure 2.4: Speed up video 2

Figure 2.5: Total of 9 sequences of the frames

We separated around 300+ frames for the stop motion video into 9 sequences.

Link to the folders: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Q0Yc5fGMS6pSbXZDmRGh2K9wHareInVf?usp=sharing

Stop motion editing

For the editing, we use Premiere Pro. I am in charge of making colour corrections and adding some dialogue captions, while my groupmate Sarah is in charge of the sound effects and background music.

Some examples of what I did for colour correction:

Figure 2.6 (left): Before colour correction

Figure 2.7 (right): After colour correction

Figure 2.8 (left): Before colour correction

Figure 2.9 (right): After colour correction

Figure 3.1 (left): Before colour correction

Figure 3.2 (right): After colour correction

Figure 3.3 (left): Before colour correction

Figure 3.4 (right): After colour correction

Figure 3.5: Putting on dialogue captions

Figure 3.6: Putting on dialogue captions

As the stop motion has some interaction between the characters, I decided to add on some dialogue captions to make the characters show more of their personalities, as I feel that this will make the stop motion video have some comedic materials.

Stop motion submission

Link to final submission file: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16MKwLI4c8dxT1W-2H5B3ahaTN_gRNgSHpKxp57BA38E/edit?usp=sharing

Figure 3.7: Stop motion final submission

---

REFLECTION

Working with my groupmate Sarah was a fun and smooth experience, as our schedule is quite flexible, we were able to spend a few hours in around 3 days together to work on the set design and finish the frames shooting on time. The story planning was initially not so interesting according to the feedback from Mr Martin. He gave us some good suggestions like making the lobster character cut the electricity wire and making the story more silly and funny. Therefore, we followed his suggestion, making the lobster cut the wire, and adding some silly dialogue captions to make the character more lively and interesting. I met some challenges to edit the colour correction frame by frame, as it is way too time-consuming to do it frame by frame. But later I found a way to save the colour edit details as presets, which make the work easier for me by selecting all the frames in each sequence and applying the saved colour presets. And of course the presets did not look perfect on some particular frames, I also did some slight changes to those.