Stories in the Making.

Creating a story board is the initial stage to creating an animation.  By doing this you organise your ideas and create a step by step plan to incorporating movement with sound.



 

By using this technique, as a group, we created a storyboard for our animation The Circle of Life.  Karen J Lloyd  explains that a storyboard is not simply a bunch of pictures, it is a form of communication that explains the process of an animation sequentially and in an organised manner.

 

With our storyboard completed we were then able to start creating our characters, organising audio through music and sound effects, choose backgrounds and decide upon movement. We decided to challenge our creative abilities by using clay for our stop-motion animation.
 

 

Our Storyboard

Our Characters

The use of a story board to  plan our stop-motion animation has enabled myself and other group members to plan the story, sound and movement.  This is an invaluable tool, not only as the group were able to make decisions prior to filming, it gave focus to the groups aim and encouraged debate, reflection, organisation and decision making.  We were able to brain-storm our ideas and compromise direction as well as delegate different tasks.

Reflecting on the use of a storyboard has allowed me to understand the collaborative work that has to be conducted.  Working as a team, sharing and decision making are all skills that the learner will construct as they bounce off ideas in a fun and interesting learning experience.

Making the figures was a very enjoyable. We used oil based clay to mould the characters as this was provided.  This type of clay is according to Stop Motion Softwear website the best for shape durability and movement.  Water based clay such as Play Doh will dry out and crack.  I made the baby, the grown man, the woman (including her growing tummy) and the stork.  I tried to make as much of each character out of one piece of clay, however with clothing it was quite difficult so with my characters the head, hands and legs or feet in the case of the grown man, were separately connected.  This concerned me as I thought that they would detach but after connecting them and trialling movement I was pleased that they remained connected.  I also found that balance was an issue so producing a figure with equal weight and out of proportion feet was time consuming and sometimes fiddly. 

Not being as experienced as some in creating models for animation I followed the advice given on a blog called Animation for Education which I found very useful.

 

When making models from Plasticine look for the following:

1- Simple, bold designs.

2- Large features which are easy to animate and bring to life.

3- Make sure the models can stand up on their own.

4- Make models large enough to animate and move.  (Animation for Education, Accessed 2014)