Fun Animation!
Glimmer Festival has been going on for nearly a week now and recent events have prooved interesting. I attended a stop motion animation workshop on Friday and I have to say the experience was both stimulating and entertaining. I thoroughly recommend adult workshops: they’re free and you come away having learnt something new.
Being presented with a pile of old paper, toys and clay and told you are going to make an animation out of it sounds a bit far fetched, but when imaginations run wild anything can happen. After being set our task I immediately made a beeline for the Lego. Lego is one of the simplest but most effective toy ever and is completely under rated. But after having a brainwave of ideas this was the only material I wanted to play with.
I was joined at the Lego table by another person by the name of Martin McCloud: a computer science graduate looking to try something new. After teaming up we began rumaging around in the huge selection of Lego parts available. We discovered various gun parts, faces, toy soliders of similarity to Toy Story, rocks and a door. An idea began to form and we decided on our project: a robot.
Between us we came up with the following scenario: Lego bricks would tumble out of a closed door and circle around before assembling themselves into a robot. Sounds simple. But for those of you who know a little about stop motion animation you will know that we were in for a long process.
The standard rate for a film is 25 frames per second. To create this kind of animation you take a photo, move the pieces mere millimeters and take another, then repeat. So for 1 second of footage we needed to take 25 pictures. The complexity of our task is hopefully now more clear.
In total it took us about 5 and a half hours to photograph and put the images together on the computer: only an hour or so was actually spent editing. Our film is around 25 seconds long, so at 25 pictures a second I’m sure you can do the math for how many images we took.
The day was brilliant though. As a film lover it is always interesting to experience first hand the effort and skill that goes in to creating films like Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and even the character Morph. But the important thing was that it was fun. Despite the long process for only a short amount of footage, the reward of seeing it work together at the end is definitely worth it. A bonus of this is that you can try it yourself at home. All you need are characters and a camera. Having never tried this until the workshop I would consider doing another project just for the fun of it.
The animation I created can be viewed here: ROBOT ATTACK. Take a look!
