The Circle of Life

As part of our Education Futures program we were to construct an animation using the child user designed software Zu3D. As part of a group of 3 we worked together and created a story board designed around the topical issue the “Circle of Life”. Sectioning our story board into various frames we included characters that were to be used along with scene music, sound effects and backgrounds. We used this story board as a reference during the next stage of our animation creation.

Once decided on a topic and setting, we moulded characters for our stop motion animation. We decided to use clay figurines as we felt this way was best suited to represent our story. As our story was about the developments of life stages we were able to remould our characters to adapt to different parts of the story, something which may possibly have been more difficult and time consuming if paper cut outs were used.

 

 

We printed out splash backs for our animation and decided to use adaptive backgrounds which could easily be used throughout the animation. The main setting was outside a home, therefore the first 6 scenes were shot in front of this setting. We felt it was best to not keep changing the background of the animation as it would interrupt the flow, something we wished to keep seamless with our stop motion approach.

 

Once the scene and characters were made we met to use the software and create our animation. Collaborating and working together we sufficiently shot the movie taking around 5 hours. Due to the creation of our characters being somewhat weeks before we did find it hard to easily create a range of movement for each shots. Something that we did overcome with efficient teamwork, we managed to take shots and create movements to the best of our ability. All three of us worked in partnership by creating the scene and taking a sequence of shots (3 each movement). This did test our patience as I don’t quite think we were aware how much time and effort to produce a mini second of a clip. We did encounter mistakes along the way which we had to crop and edit out of the production. On occasions we caught hand movements within frames which we then had to undo and reshoot. Luckily these faults were noticed during the creation stage and no errors were detected after filming.

After shooting the movie as a group we met again to add music and sound effects. This part of the production stage was definitely the most testing. We cropping music clips and applying them to our movie we encountered a number of disturbances. As the music is imperative part of the animation we wanted to ensure it was faultless therefore a lot of time and effort (blood, sweat and tears) was put into the implementation of the music. We used the song “On My Way” by Rusted Root as we felt it was uplifting and nicely complemented our movie. Throughout we then added various sound effects from the sound database to show further detail in our animation (baby talking, kissing sound effects, and background rock music). During the scene where the couple conceive the child, we added a firework banner, and the sound track “Marvin Gaye- Let’s get it on”, to not only to set the scene but to make light heated entertainment out of the situation. As the soundtrack was only required for a short while, we encountered challenges when fading out the music and bringing back in our original theme tune. After numerous efforts we managed to successfully mix both songs without any noticeable disruption. After we were happy with our SAVED production we recorded it on our phones to have copy via smart phone.

When it came to showcasing our stop motion animation to our greatest disappointment somehow the added sound effects and sound media was not to be seen. We were left to feel extremely saddened as our greatest efforts went into making the sound making perfect. The only way to overcome the situation was either to show our movie without sound or to (luckily) play our smartphone recorded version. As a group we felt the music had a great part to play in creating the atmosphere we intended (light hearted and entertaining) therefore we agreed to play the sound media through my phone. Unfortunately there was background noise during the first few scenes however from feedback it seemed to go unnoticed. Although as a group we were greatly disappointed I feel we overcome the dilemma well and worked with what we had.

 (Overcome by using the sound recorded on video smart phone)

Feedback from peers highlighted our efforts when stuck with the dilemma we encountered. They commented on how they enjoyed certain aspects of the movie like the seamless production of the character growing from a baby to a man and how time was represented by the parents growing older. Overall I feel we worked well as a group in creating the stop motion animation, although we were headed with a slight problem I feel we created a well-produced stop motion animation and achieved all learning objectives during the process.