Stop motion Evaluation

Overall I found stop motion quite challenging. Stop motion needs a lot of patience something that I havenʼt always got. I found managing my team quite difficult as they seemed to go off task quickly. I feel the animation could have been made better if I had more time. If I had more time I would have tried to make a better set and perhaps use better lighting which donʼt give off an orange tint. Iʼve looked into alternatives and found that LED lights would be best suited for my stop motion, the benefits of this are that the colour of the light would be white and appear more natural another benefit is that LEDʼs give off next to no heat which means my risk assessment would be minimized and there would be less fire hazards. The down side to this is that the cost of the lights is significantly more, meaning i would need a bigger budget. Something else I would change in my animation is the frame rate of the animation. The finished animation appears to be quite jumpy at times however this would probably be down to shooting the animation across multiple days and having to remove the camera from the room for security reasons.

My animation was intended to be an action film for a predominantly male audience. The style of the animation is quite rough and sketchy which perhaps targets my audienceʼs age group of teenagers who are probably quite messy. The narrative of my animation is about 2 characters Elliott and Jacq who race their old cars down the street regularly, the voiceover at the beginning seems to reveal that the boys have had some anger or banter in the past and itʼs important to win the race. However the race doesnʼt end how the audience might expect as itʼs all over to quickly. My animation begins with a stop motion technique called pixilation which is stop motion using people. Weʼve speeded this up to add a comedy effect to the animation and added the voice over which is out of sync, again for comedy effect. We then use the technique of stop motion using toy cars. We used 15 Frames Per Second for our animation which made our animation quick paced and kept our audience interested. The overall technical qualities of the animation are quite average. We found lighting the animation quite a challenge as we were working in a small space with large lights. This caused problems with shadows as there wasnʼt much room to move lights around to reduce shadows. We over come this problem by moving the light high up on the tripod but this added risk to the lights possibly falling over and causing injury or fire. The creative qualities of my animation has got to be the use of my set. Although i think it could have been made better It was a good creative initiative to print images off at A3 size. This added realism to the animation and placed the narrative in a real situation. It could also make the audience feel immersed with the action as it is more realistic and perhaps make them feel like they are actually watching the race live.

After I had finished the Stop Motion animation I wanted to get some feedback to see what people thought of it. I started my questionnaire with standard questions like Age, Occupation etc. This gives me a clear understanding of the range of age groups and allows me to see if their is a correlation between peoples opinions and age.

From the people we surveyed 60% were male and 40% were female. This firstly makes me realise that the animation which was aimed at a predominately male audience has interested them more then females, and therefore appearing to give me a positive result. However we also targeted a female audience which is also good as it means our target audience is broader then our intentions.

My next question is an important one which tells us our overall quality of the animation. Did you enjoy our animation? 80% of people surveyed said they like the animation compared to a small 20% which said no they didnʼt like the animation. I then go onto ask what people

liked about the animation an answer that i see arise on a few different answers is that humorous quality of the pixilation voiceover at the start; ʻI like the way the pixilation photos are speeded up at the beginning this creates a sense of humor and makes the way the characters speak really funnyʼ The voiceovers are a bit exaggerated but this was clearly done on purpose and makes it look funnyʼ Another answer is that people liked ʻThe sound effects of the cars racingʼ whereas some people simply liked ʻthe snappiness of the whole animationʼ .This is really good feedback about the animation as a whole and it makes me more confident about the overall animation despite thinking that it wasnʼt very good.

At the start we used a technique called pixelation which is when you animate humans by stop motion. This is a key part to the overall animation as it is this that gives the animation the narrative for the audience to understand what is going on. We struggled to sync to sound perfectly so we by speeding up the frame rate of the pictures it allowed for a comical effect which has been well received by our audience. The two characters Elliott and Jacq are planning for a drag race when things donʼt go to plan and one of them crash into the other. We then leave our audience in suspense as an ambulance and police car arrives before fading to black. The effect of fading to black allows for the audience to be left in suspense and wanting more. It could also mean that both car drivers have passed away. However we leave this for the audience to decide.

A lot of the feedback we got was relating to the sound that we added to our animation we asked ʻDid you like the soundtrack, and why?ʼ We got some more great feedback one person explains ʻ The sound works really well and creates a sense of realism, especially the car effects - as this gives the illusion of them driving really fast and crashingʼ. Despite the good feedback we also got some constructive criticism ʻI think the sound could of been synced better, there is no ambient soundʼ. Although trying to sync the sound more accurately it proved to be more difficult. However adding some more non diegetic ambient sound such as birds tweeting or crowds cheering could have made the sound more interesting and again adding to the realism of it.

We then asked what peoples favorite part of the animation was. One person states that his favorite part was ʻthe car crash sceneʼ he then goʼs onto say ʻAlthough it would have been better to see some blood on the floorʼ. another person says ʻI like the suspension at the end as it leaves me wanting to watch moreʼ.

One of our last questions was ʻWhat style of animation would you call our stop motionʼ We had mixed responses with 50% saying Action, 30% saying crime and 20% saying funny. With this feedback our target audience can be widened, however Action, Crime and comedy are quite often 3 elements that are found together when watching blockbuster films like BadBoys, Rush Hour and lethal Weapon. However their aren't many animations that involve all three elements. So this is potentially a new Niche audience.