Project 2 – WIP 1 – Experimentation

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

For our second project, Chandi and I wanted to be a little more ambitious. Before we met up to brainstorm an idea, I started doodling a character to practice the cutout technique. I made some quick sketches of a girl in a dress and I drew out each body part separately. Then I cut out the dress, legs, arms, head, and so on. Soon I realized I might need more poses for her legs, so I drew a couple bent legs and one of her standing on her toes.

The coffee table in my dorm has a glass top, so I used my phone and an app called Stop Motion Studio to shoot a quick test animation. The character isn’t connected at the joints yet, but I was still able to learn a bit about the technique we’ll need.

I went out and bought some fasteners that we can use for the joints on our actual characters and they’re quite big, so I know we can scale up our characters and backgrounds a bit. I also bought some scissors, so I don’t have to keep borrowing my roommate’s!

Chandi and I came up with a fun idea about a girl who is performing on the street for tips. She will trip and fall into a sewer that has toxic waste in it. She’ll then emerge as a mutated monster will glowing yellow eyes. As a monster she will now force all the people watching to dance for her. We might add an ending where someone comes and gives her an antidote, but for now the plan is to just have the camera pedestal towards the sky and it fade to black.

Storyboards and Character Experimentation
Test animation

Sydney McPherson

Chandi Marsh

Project 2-WIP 1-Pre-production

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

             Julia and I will be working together once again and this time we feel that we want to shift the tone of our animation and make something rather scary for the paper cut out assignment. We will be leaning toward making paper dolls and trying to establish some kind of depth and perspective with the backgrounds and the puppets themselves. Currently, we are trying to decide if we should use the down shooter to capture out animator or get creative with it and see if we can rig up something ourselves.

             We have also decided that for our materials we are sticking to merely black, white, and grey paper, some pens to add detail and pegs to give the puppets some movement.

Content wise, we have settled on the monster and three shots we would like to accomplish.

We would like to have the monster be all black and have most of the terror come from twitchy uncanny character acting. Linked with this post are some rough boards of the shots we have settled on as well as a rough break down and notes of the puppet for the monster.

Julia Reymundo and LeAnn Schmitt