The Stop Motion

It's safe to say the part of the process I have enjoyed the most is animating the stop motion. This was my biggest assigned role from the start, and the part I wanted to experiment with and develop further.

In the end we managed to get 1 minutes worth of footage, which is about half of the full animation. The video below is an unedited version of the animation, David has edited this and looped parts of it to make it last longer, which works a lot better then the order I've put it in here.

Overall, I am happy with the animation I was able to produce; the main problem with it however - that a few people have pointed out - is the lighting. We used the florescent lights which constantly switch on and off about 50 times a second, normally used just to set up the stop motion pieces to then be switched off while animating. Apparently there are ways to fix this by either editing the photos or putting some sort of filter on so that the lighting looks to be on purpose, which we can always look into after the deadline.

Considering how stiff the models are, I feel that I have managed to move them fairly well; the characters were as I predicted earlier, stiff but manageable to manoeuvre. I think they were starting to take the strain towards the end, particularly the strawberry since she is the one who had to move the most; the drummer's arms or seating position weren't very stable but he could stretch further than the others; the lemon was hard to move but I only had to move his arms so I didn't have much trouble with him; the aubergine was the wrong proportion compared to his saxophone and couldn't move far so there were some issues there; and the orange's arms had a limited range but I think his motion works really well for this animation.
The animation is jagged in places but I can see as the sequence plays out, my animating improved. This in itself is an achievement for me, since my aim in every project is to improve my skills as an animator!