Stop Motion: Production and Post Production

Research to Inform

Music lyric videos are a great source of fun kinetic typography, and the song I Won’t by AJR is a prime example. Created by Jeremy Wechsler @logoanimator, the words transition into the next so fluidly that you can’t take your eyes off of them. The idea of figuring out which letters can morph into others and then animating it all is insane.

Create

I decided to go with my linear story idea 1. because it’s simpler but also 2. I thought it was a cute and sweet little story.

Set Building

I spent about a day and a half building my set pieces out of Lego. I fiddled around a lot, but the main features I ended up with were small pieces around the doorway so it could easily be “broken down” and an interesting wall and roof system. I build a full sized white wall that would be on the outside for wider shots and on the other side for inside shots. But I also made a smaller half wall so when looking through the doorway from outside, there wouldn’t be a gap.

The roof design was it would be one way for the wide shots and then turned for the inside shots. It started with two different-colored flat pieces, but I added a bunch of yellow bricks on top of them to make it a consistent color.

I created a “ramp” for the dinosaurs to bring the table up. I used angled bricks on the top edge so it could hang from the roof. I tried a ramp with the smooth side of Lego bricks, but it was hard to balance the table and dinosaurs on. So instead, I used these old panel pieces with the studs facing up which allowed me to temporarily attach a table leg in place and position the dinosaurs.

Last major thing, even though the T-Rex is the big dino…it still wasn’t tall enough to reach the roof on its own. I created a little staircase that would attach to the base platforms as well as a small stack of three bricks that would support the tail off screen.

Shooting

I set up my lighting with my ceiling light on and my lamp in the top right. I used a Canon DSLR camera on a tripod with a remote trigger to shoot the pictures.

On one hand, the remote was very useful for taking photos without touching the camera and being near the set. On the other, I experienced a lot of annoyance of trying to hold a weird dino position and having to wait for the camera to stop being “busy” so I could click the button again.

I positioned different shots by raising or lowering the tripod, angling the camera, and zooming the lens in or out. I had to make sure to only show what I wanted to include and to frame characters correctly.

Importing the Photos

I transferred the photos over to my laptop. I had deleted a lot while shooting, but I ended up moving 500 pictures over (went down to 487 in the final product).

A major struggle for me was with renaming my photos. I tried importing my images into Adobe Premiere Pro as a sequence, but not all of them were coming in. I realized it was because there were gaps in the number order from my deleting.

I selected all of the photos and tried naming them “Photo.” It seemed to work at first, with them naming themselves Photo (1), Photo (2), Photo (3), etc. but I couldn’t import as a sequence at all now. It might have had to do with the parentheses, so I had to try something else.

Unfortunately, I have a Windows computer not a Mac, so there weren’t easy mass-rename options.

Fortunately, I found and downloaded a program with a feature called Power Rename. After finally figuring out how to select every picture, I was able to rename them in order. I attempted, messed up, and fixed a bunch of other ideas in between, but eventually I came back to all my photos imported as one sequence.

Sounds

I tried looking for ambient sounds on bensound.com but soon realized it was mostly music. I went to another site, freesound.org to look for sound effects. The main sound effect I wanted was one for the table getting knocked over. I found one of a recycling bin that worked well. Then, I looked for a scraping sound for the dinosaurs pushing the table. I found one for that too. In particular, while cutting up the audio, I realized the ‘thump’ at the end was good for implying them putting down the table off-screen.

For the music, I thought I would do a friendly, happy song for the beginning and then maybe a sad one for after the table fell. I found a happy song that didn’t sound too much like a YouTube video and put it in, lowering the volume afterwards. I timed it to end when the table fell and…to be honest, I found the abrupt smashing sound and music ending to be pretty funny. It made me chuckle a bit every time it played.

I got a nice, slightly sad song and added it after a small pause. When the big dinosaur returns, I brought the happy music back in another unintentionally kinda funny cut.

Final Piece

My final animation ended up a little longer than I had anticipated. This was mostly because I wanted pauses at certain moments to add tension and improve the timing/flow. I made the first picture stay on longer to set the scene as well and of course, the credits at the end took up some time.

Overall, I think my stop motion animation turned out pretty good and quite silly. You can watch it down below and see if it makes you laugh as much as it did me and the people I showed it to.