Shane Le Mar - Modelling Stop Motion Character and Background

Evaluation

Matthew Lindfield

In this stop motion model making project, I was tasked to produce a stop motion project using an original character model of my creation along with a set for the character to be contained within. For this project, like all of the previous projects I have been involved in, there were several steps to produce the final product. The first step was the planning phase. The first thing I did was to come up with a character design, I wanted to create a character that would just revolve around a piece of clothing to both give more of an authentic feeling over a standard character model and to also allow my character to have more uniqueness to them.

One thing I also figured was a fully clothed character would allow me to focus less on the characters body, but to let me focus on one aspect, the clothing. My initial idea was to create a hazmat suit, but I decided to search up other ideas as a backup. A few ideas I looked into were a ninja outfit, a father Christmas character and an animal mascot suit similar to what you would expect to see at a children’s birthday party.  All of these ideas seemed to have unique possible ways to go about them but I decided to go with my original idea of a hazmat costume.

I gathered several references for a hazmat suit, looking at both real and fictional examples from other animation projects and various video games. After gathering what I thought were enough examples to do this I started to design my own outfit. Using a pattern for a boiler suit, as it would create a full body outfit I created a rough digital version and simulated the patterns creation in a piece of software called “marvelous designer”. This allowed me to accurately simulate what the pattern would look like on a human body. Once happy with the results, tweaking the pattern to be how I wanted, I moved onto creating the physical clothing model.

Using a laser cutter and a plastic material, I cut out the pattern. I then sewed it together the various sections with a needle and thread. Putting together the torso, trousers and arms in 3 separate parts. Using these, now connected, sections, I used them as reference for the skeleton. Holding up metal wire to the model I roughly measured the size of the wire that I would need to create the skeleton, and cutting to that length I then inserted the wire frame into the clothing. Padding it out with some yellow fabric also allowed me to allow give some extra bulk to the skeleton to simulate the characters body. The bonus of having a fully clothed skeleton allowed the ‘bulk’ to be as messy as possible as the viewer would not be able to see it. I then sewed all the other sections together, the arms to the torso and the torso to the trousers.

The next step was to create the set. I knew I wanted to create a science laboratory of some kind so I did research into several different kinds of laboratories. The main differences I found in a lot of real and fictional results were the 2 “types” of laboratory I found were either a clean or derelict scene. Clean scenes looking very modern, sterile and crisp. Surfaces being white and shiny with lots of fancy equipment. The other more derelict designs being covered in mould, dirt and rust, with lots of broken machines and general destruction with these scenes looking very dark in comparison to the cleaner designs. I knew that either design would be usable but would give a completely different tone with the outcome.

I decided to go with a compromise, having a somewhat dark and noisy scene but without too much dirt and destruction. For this I decided to have most of my scene be constructed out of a metal grate type material, with a computer terminal that the character would interact with. I created each of the separate parts, the floor being made of a green material similar to a circuit board to help give detail, the walls being made of a grey metal panelling, a giant metal door and a computer terminal made from images I sourced from the NASA open image library to help give more of a scientific look to my scene. After printing these images out, I attached them to cardboard, cut them out and then assembled the pieces together.

The next step was to film the scene. After some feet were attached to the character model, made of plasticine to allow the character to stay in place easier as well to give some extra details, the character was placed into the scene. A tripod was set up along with a DSLR camera which was focused to allow the character model to be in focus. I then manipulated the character model to walk through the laboratory scene, moving the arms back and forward to simulate a walk and to make sure the character stayed up-right as to not fall over. Once the character got to a certain point, the camera position was changed to give an over-the-shoulder feel, the character then was manipulated to interact with the terminal keyboard. After this the character and model were manipulated again to allow the character to face the camera, a few more frames were taken to show them moving around.

This image sequence was then imported into ‘Dragonframe’ and exported as a video file. This was then sent to After Effects for post-production work. I wanted the film to look like it was some sort of damaged film with distortion applied. I sourced several videos of different types of distortion. Primarily VHS static and a dirty film grain look, as well as a general vignette effect to allow the edges to look damaged.

I found when imported most of the effect videos were a smaller resolution than my film itself, to help with this I increased their scale, but this caused those shots to be blurry. To fix this I sharpened the videos, this gave them a crisper look and a style that seemed to fit a damaged film style. I then played around with the various effects, to let the effect videos look like they were damaging the footage, letting me play around with the colour styles and opacity, the original film started to look more authentic. I then applied some colour correction to the scene to make it look washed out and old. To help the film start and end in a creepy way I had a black VHS static video initially play for a couple of seconds before my film started to play, giving it a sort of intro and outro that it wouldn’t have my default.

Next was to create the sound, I knew I wouldn’t need much in terms of sound such as a song playing as the video was only short and it would overcomplicate it too much. I decided to combine few static sound tracks as well as a very simple “drone” sound to give the soundtrack a slight ambient tone to it to help compliment the noise track. I moved these around the timeline to let each one come in at a certain time and fade out of synch so the sound effects wouldn’t start and end at the same time. Happy with my result I exported the final sequence, both video and audio together.