Project 1 – WIP Post 2 – Production

Posted on by Eunhae Mary Park

The film was shot in Victoria’s room. The animation (the movement of the characters and the props) was done by Victoria and the camerawork and the compositing were done by me. When animating, we had to shoot more frames at smaller intervals because our first shot did not have enough frames for the movement of the characters to translate as smoothly when played out.

We ran into difficulties in setting up the camera angle especially for the over-the-shoulder in the mirror shot as we had to hold the camera up by hand. During compositing, we used holds for certain frames to create breathing space between each major movement.

The music will be provided by Alex Wang, a sound design major SCAD student. The music, “우리동네 빨간 길” (Our neighborhood’s red street) can be found on Wang’s Instagram (alex_w_music). The clip will be complete after the music is inserted on top of the animation.

Victoria Courchesne
Eunhae Mary Park

Project 1-WIP 1-Pre-production and Production

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

For our first project, Julia Reymundo and I will be doing a stop-motion animation about making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To keep it simple there are no elaborate sets or people in the shots. ( I have a hand cameo but that’s it) We drew most of our inspiration from the Haunted Hotel By James Stuart Blackton and the idea that the objects were able to move independently with what looked like no human intervention.

There was not a lot of pre-production work since we settled on the concept very quickly due to its simplicity. Most of our time went into spit balling ideas on what camera we could use and how we were going to get nice angles without a tripod. We decided we would be using an ipad and a free stop-motion software that I found in the app store. For post production we plan on putting the exported film into Premiere and enhancing the movement of the objects with sounds and background music.

During production we had to get rather creative when it came to shooting since we were in a cramped kitchen trying to get dynamic shots of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We ended up using a bowl, a drying rack, and even a rice cooker as our makeshift tripods. It was a fun experience.

LeAnn Schmitt and Julia Reymundo

Major Post 1: Svankmajer

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech surrealist puppeteer and animator who was born in 1934. He uses a mix of both stop motion animation and live action to accomplish a very unsettling storytelling aesthetic. A lot of his work appears to be inspired by early animators such as George Melies who used stop motion as a way to create trick films. You do not need to watch a lot of Svanmajer’s work to see that this same idea of tricking the audience by making strategic cuts and using stop motion elements. However, I will say that his techniques are much more advanced and hold up much better than Melies’s.

             Svanmajer’s most famous piece of work is a three-part short film called Food that features 3 distinct shorts examining the relationship with humans. The whole film is a combination of stop motion, videos, and claymation. Most of the clay is only used for a few frames to create very scary wild expressions that can make the viewers skin crawl by how uncanny and how abrupt they are.

LeAnn Schmitt