The Assemble
For this quarter, we are assigned into groups to make Live-Action Stop-motion Animation. It was more of a open-ended project when we can create anything. So I was assigned in a group with Andrew Stover, Logan Keck, Alex Schmidt, and Laura Armstrong.
The Storyboard
Here was the original storyboard that we used.
The Creation of the Project
Once we got assembled into a team (No Avengers Reference here, moving on.) We were thinking about a Mage War as in 2 wizards fighting each other. In our storyboard, we planned to get 2 wizards on the stage and fight each other by creating objects at each other. It would get serious and intense and there was a homeless girl interrupted them and the both wizards decided to give them gold and disappear by leaving the magic hat and the wand behind and the girl will gain power. (Eventually we have to remove that ending for some reasons, I will explain more after this rough video that we came up with.)
The Rough Draft Video
Removing/Improving the Project
After getting reviewed by my other fellow classmates, we were able to remove the ending about the girl because we feel like there should be another better ending and we came up with the ending of the 2 wizards getting intense and teleported to the wild west and ended the fight by pointing their wands at each other and vanished while the audience members were in shock or has no comment while 2 people clapped about it.
Filming (Part 1)
After feeling good about our plan, we started filming it. I was the cameraman while Logan and Andrew are the wizards. We decided to use the Green Screen that was provided by the school. We gathered props from Logan and Laura which includes the wands, specific wardrobes and couple of crazy hats. After a long process of taking tons of picture. We were able to work on the project. But...
We found the problem while using the
Keylight 1.2 on After Effects that Andrew's hat that parts of his hat were reflective and it caused some of his hat that
links to the green screen and it wasn't good. Our reaction is basically like
this:
So we have to re-take EVERYTHING.
Filming (Part 2)
So we re-took everything by using a different hat like the picture above. And while taking pictures, we decided to add few things to the video like adding Laura and Alex being appeared by Logan and Andrew and walked off the stage while they try to punch/kick until they fell on the stage.
Editing
We used Adobe After Effects to do this project by getting the pictured together and edit the frame lengths and make it look like stop-motion. We use 8 frames per second for the Composition setting.
We all have jobs to edit. My jobs were:
Finished Project
Here is the finished project! I also made the opening title. We all agreed that we could've made this animation much longer..
What did you learn?
That it's pretty neat to use Keylight 1.2 on After Effects because it was the first time I used the green screen for this project. I also learned I'm such a terrible cameraman because of my unstable hands! Next time I'll just stick with a tripod..
What would you do differently?
We all feel like we need more time on this project. I feel like we could so something different about Mage War. We don't know that yet, we could've created something different.
Final Thoughts/Ending
I like doing this project, but yet we're not professional on stop-motion projects. We're just improving. At the end, will I do this again? Yes I would. See you next time with a different animation blogs!
My Fellow Group Members Blogs
