ArtDes 300, Sec. 05
Winter 2006
Prof. Heidi Kumao

Stills from Dante's Inferno, an animated, puppetized version of the original classic by Sandow Birk and Paul Zaloom. (Note the close attention to lighting/shadows).

Assignment #2
Stop Motion Animation: Bringing Inanimate Things to Life

Due Thurs. Feb. 2, 2006
One 30 second animated short with audio

Stop-motion animation is basically THE ORIGINAL animation technique. The idea of taking a series of stills (drawings, photos), and watching them in sequence as a nineteenth century toy or as a flip book predates ALL animated films that you see today.

For this assignment, you can use any materials you like: found objects, puppets, clay, people, paper, cars, plants, your pets, string, drawings, paintings, food, hair, a newspaper, or dirt, etc. Your "main characters" can be completely abstract objects, patterns or visuals, they can be puppets with personalities, or they can be things from your everyday life. Animate whatever you think would be really FUN and interesting to watch MOVE in creative and wild ways!

You can approach this assignment's audio/video component 2 different ways:

-Audio first, visuals second: record and edit your audio first. This is standard in most television/Hollywood productions, especially for any animation that will have lip synching (difficult to do). Record audio in the V-Room, or create a sound track using Garageband. Edit the final mix of many tracks in Final Cut Pro. Edit the visuals to synchronize with the audio.

-Visuals first, Audio second: create the animation, THEN add sounds. This is the way some Visual artists work. Once you have the visuals, it will be easy to fit the mood of the piece.

Create a series of stills in which you move, shape, change, form, and manipulate your objects. You can use Framethief (free trial for 30 days) on your laptop or you can just shoot using your video camera and put the footage into Final Cut and shorten/lengthen stills using the blade tool.

Try to create some visual surprises for yourself and your audience.

Kinetic sandwich by Eric Dyer (stop motion journey through a sandwich)

Jan Svankmajer's interpretation of a conversation