Production Diary 6 - Adrift - (7/11/16 - 13/11/16)

This week I have been animating, yay! I was really excited to start animating but also a little nervous as I had never done papercut animation before, but so far it has been going really well.

Before all that I went into the stop motion studio and did a little test to see what it was like and I made my character do a jump. I could then start to understand the timing of stop motion and here I felt my character needed a little more squash and stretch even though this is difficult with papercut animation.

This is one of my favourite scenes I have done so far and I really love the look of it. I am struggling with trying to make smooth motions with this kind of animating and I knew this would be one of the main struggles I faced. I have found that you need to take a lot of frames for this effect and tiny movements between frames. I have also found it helps to use grids to plan out where your action is going so you can follow this.

→ My next steps are just to keep on animating all my scenes, scan in all my painted backgrounds and try and figure out the last scene as I'm struggling with the transition from one side of the scene to the other. I may have to move the stop motion studio around a little as I'm finding it hard to move the image on one table as it's A1. I also want to take multiple shots of my animation scenes if I have time, this way I will be able to critically choose which I think work better and which weren't animated as well as I feel they could have been.