Animation project evaluation

 We produced a 1 minute long stop motion following the story of a pair of shoes who lost their partner shoe. To begin with we started by writing out our story in a group and identifying who our main character was and what the object of their desires was. in our case it was the matching shoe. We then had to pitch our ideas to the group. After this we had to come up with a storyboard and moodpboard for our animation. Making a moodpboard is a useful way of comping research we did ours as a collage of images found on the internet and pictures of props that we already had and wanted to use. I think on my next project I would like to spend more time on the mood board as it’s a very good way of visually laying out ideas and I was surprised to see the kinds of connections you are able to make when things are laid out in front of you. For example in our mood board we had a picture of a puddle but weren’t sure where we would be able to find a similar setting we could shoot in. After searching for a few images in our mood board we realised we could shoot near the concrete floor in level 9 and it would give us the same desired effect. Then we had to produce the storyboard. It was highlighted to us that we need a storyboard as a way of clearly illustrating your ideas to other members of the group instead of relying on the fact that they will be able to understand your concept just by verbal explanation. It was also a nice to have a plan ready for us that we could follow when it came to shooting. I am not very strong at drawing so I shyed away from doing the storyboard but now that I understand how important it is I think next time one of my ideas are being used I will volunteer to do the storyboard.

We shot ours on the app iStopmtion and recorded our sounds on a rascal recorder. We spent a great deal of consideration in planning our shots so it looked like the audience was following the shoe on it’s journey. In the crit we received some feedback saying that our use of different camera angles to make the audience feel like they were following the shoe was very effective. This was very positive feedback for us. We also had to do some foley and voice sounds. We were told that all the sounds had to be diegetic and that we weren’t allowed to use any background music etc. Since we didn’t want to download any sounds we had to be a little inventive with our recordings. For the sound of the lassoo we used the string in our id cards and for the sound of the shoe drowning in water we spent some time in the toilet sinks recording water sounds. We edited the sound track in audition and had to spend a lot of time copying and pasting the sound we had recording the sound of the shoe moving around that we had recorded. Perhaps in the future it might be worth recording a longer sound clip so save us this hassle next time.

We decided to use photos of real shoes instead of drawings because we all had a number of shoes available to us and we thought it would be nice to use them.

In terms of things that went well in the crit we were told that our main character’s motivations were clear and whilst the story made sense it perhaps it could have been clearer in places. We agreed with this feedback. If we had over a minute to present we would have liked to spend some more time establishing the world of the shoes and spent longer showing the interactions between each pair of shoes so that the story made more sense and it was easier to understand the stakes of a shoe losing it’s other half in this made up world.

Link to animation 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B579osy0yQysNmdZUkxuOHdmeTg/view?usp=sharing