Stop Animation Project

Stop Motion Animation Project

As part of Education Futures module at the Swansea Metropolitan University I had to create my own conceptual stop motion animation. For this I teamed up with my peers Dominic Jame and Rhys Jenkins. Were given full freedom it what resources and tools we could use, we decided we wanted to do something a little bit unique, so we began to research. After brainstorming some ideas we decided to do stop motion animation using Lego figures.

My co-workers Rhys Jenkins and Dom James.

There is a wide range of excellent Lego animations on the internet to become inspired by, so we began to watch these to become inspired as to how we would go about film. One famous Lego YouTube animator we looked at was Michael Hickox, we found is films very amusing and highly professional. The below film is one of my favorites of his titled 'Lego Golf'.

Concept

So we had decided to use Lego as a resource all we had left was to choose a concept to base our animation story on. As we are all students studying Education we thought it would be appropriate to choose Inclusion as this is a big talking point of any educational system. After researching again we found an excellent poem based around the topic of inclusion Randy Basset from the Opening Hearts Inclusion Project in Canada. We emailed him asking for his permission to use his poem and he quickly replied saying yes as long as we sent a finished copy of our work so that he might use on his website.

After this we bought our superhero Lego characters and began filming, they were:-

1. Captain America
2. Iron Man
3. Thor
4. Hawk Eye
5. The Hulk
6. Black Widow
7. Nick Fury

Setting the Scene

For layout we made a cardboard cut to hold the scene together, we found a countryside background and a green Lego floor plate to set the outdoor scene. As for the story we used Randy Basset's poem as a template using each verse of the poem as a basis for the scene. We began filming using the software Zu3D which is a primary education program. We took three pictures of a set scene then moved the Lego characters to their next position and took three pictures again. After we had finished creating all the scenes we added our voices and sound effects.

Problems

The project did take us over ten hours to complete and unfortunately we did encounter some problems along the way.  Firstly we were not sure whether or not it was an issue with Zu3D or the computer itself however we did suffer from the program becoming slow taking pictures. It also often took up to an hour to save our project due to the amount of frames we had to take to complete the animation. Another problem we encountered was the inputting the sound, this was as we found it difficult to import, cut and place the sounds to fit in time with the film.  In conclusion, we as a group all agreed we thoroughly enjoyed the project, however if we were to do a similar one in the future we would research into what other animation software was available to us. 

Finished Project

This is our finished project titled 'Super Inclusion' and I hope you enjoy.