Moving Image & Photography

(The "Angry" and "Happy" people used in our animation)

During this week we had to create an animation based on the word "Light". In our group we had five people and we came up with a few ideas of what to do. We had decided that we definitely wanted to use fire, which was our interpretation of "Light", in our animation. The teacher, Steve, came to talk to our group about what to do and mentioned about when moving to a new house, you should light a candle in every room to burn all the bad spirits. This was the main inspiration for our animation. With plasticine we created 6 "Angry" people and 6 "Happy" people. Our idea was that we would animate the "Angry" people going into the box, burn the box and then animate the "Happy" people coming out of the box. I had dabbled in animation before but never really thought about a storyline this much, so I was very excited to get going with the project. However, when we started to film (using stop/start animation) I started to realise how long this was going to take. Moving the people, taking a picture and then moving them again repeatedly was proving to be a laborious task. We managed to finish the filming in one day though, and so the next day we dedicated to editing. We had trouble deciding what to do with the fire, we originally wanted to physically burn the box to create a contrast between pixelated animation and real time film. This, however, proved to be difficult due to the change of both location and lighting so we used red, orange and yellow tissue paper to create an animated fire effect. Whilst we were editing, we added a "Glow" filter effect to the fire frames to make it seem as if there were a real fire, I thought it looked really good and we kept the effect on the frames. We added angry crowd noises when the "Angry" people were being shown, a crackling fire sound for the fire and played R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" song for when the "Happy" people came out of the box. I really enjoyed this week and would like to possibly go into this pathway myself but there are still 3 other pathways to try out. If we had more time on the project, I would have liked to use larger scale plasticine models to add more detail into their facial expressions, but I think they would also be easier to move and control in comparison to smaller models.