Stop Motion

Made by Kylian Smeets and Johny Wuijts (me)

Final product:

Process:

Introduction

I made this project all the way back in 2019. Revisiting it in 2022, I'm still proud of it, but there are also a lot of big mistakes: we were way too ambitious, had no idea what we could do in the limited time we had, and this resulted in an extremely long process for what is only a 30 second video. I translated the process into English and made a few things clearer, the original Dutch version, along with extra behind the scenes images and videos, can be found here.

Phase 1: Ideas

The client (a teacher) asked Kylian if he wanted to make a stopmotion video. He could present this video during his intake to SintLucas. The client brought Playmobil and was looking for something to use it for. Kylian looked through the Playmobil, and then wrote a few ideas (in Dutch):

English transcription:

  1. Chase through time. The villain stole something important and is trying to flee using a time machine.
  2. Someone buried a huge treasure that many people are trying to find.
  3. The revenge of the indians. The indians want to take the land back that had been taken from them, and do everything they can to succeed.
  4. A failed experiment. A professor thought he could save the world, but everything went wrong. The past and future got mixed up and the world is about to end. Can the professor still save the world?
  5. The heroes of the past. People from various periods in time, like a knight, hunter-gatherer, indian and robot, and are on an adventure together.

Phase 2: I joined

The client asked Johny (with Kylian's permission) if he wanted to help Kylian with this stopmotion project and if he could help Kylian choose one of the 5 ideas. The client had a preference but let us choose first.

Phase 3: Choosing an idea

Johny and Kylian discussed the ideas and ended up choosing idea 2 (the buried treasure), in combination with characters from various periods in time (idea 5). We didn't choose idea 1 or 4 because we thought they would be too complicated. We didn't choose idea 3 because idea 5 had indians as well.

Then we used the story circle theory to write a basic plotline for the story:

  1. Treasure is buried.
  2. The main characters are fighting monsters, making you learn about their personalities.
  3. Someone thanks the main characters for slaying the monsters, and tells them about a hidden treasure.
  4. Everyone wants to find the treasure, so the main characters start their journey to find it.
  5. They look all around the world in search of the treasure.
  6. They find the treasure.

At this point, we wanted to start with the stopmotion, so we delayed working out step 6, 7 and 8.

Phase 4: Requirements

We planned to make a short film, of around 11 minutes. We needed:

Phase 5: Working out the scenes

We started working out a few scenes: a desert, a forest and a dungeon.

  1. The desert: a greenscreen with sandstorm effect.
  2. The forest: handmade trees made from corks, with added moving parts like grass and insects.
  3. The dungeon: a hallway where the characters get chased by digitally animated monsters.

The desert

We wanted to use a greenscreen, but after testing for a while, we concluded that with the lighting and room we had, this wouldn't look good, and would only result in more work and less quality. For example, after messing with the settings for 30 minutes, this was our best result:

You can still see the green screen on the edges of the characters. We researched other stopmotion videos, and we discovered that other stopmotion works rarely use any greenscreen. Stop motion movies almost always use handmade backgrounds. Even if they do use it, it is very specialized. We had no experience with any of this, so we decided not to use a greenscreen and instead make the backgrounds ourselves.

Since we weren't using a greenscreen anymore, we were also considering not adding digitally animated monsters. We wanted to make a giant spider out of K'nex, but there was no K'nex available. We ended up making clay monsters.

For the background, instead of a greenscreen, we made it physically, by digitally drawing the horizon, and using wads of paper as rocks/sand. We made the background on top of a box, so that we could bury the treasure in the "ground".

While we were making this scene, we realized it was taking too long, and we couldn't finish the whole movie in time. We decided to make it into a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist, to make it shorter. Now we only had to finish a few scenes, and we didn't need to think out the whole plot.

We also thought about adding a narrator, that could talk about the events of the movie, and also add a few jokes. We thought about using UTAUloid, a free voice synthesizer program, for this. We also thought about having the characters sit in a room together, so they could talk about their adventures, with cutaways to different scenes. This would allow for completely separate scenes with no connections. We started taking pictures for the first scene, and made it into a video to see how it looked.

The dungeon

While working on this scene, Johny suggested he add background music, using the music making software BoscaCeoil, since he was already experimenting with it and thought it would be a good addition. Meanwhile, Kylian was drawing the walls and the floors of the dungeon. After printing these, Kylian built the decor while Johny worked on the background music.

Johny brought a lamp that could change into any color, we wanted to use this for lighting this scene.

We found some clay for the monsters, and did a survey with other people in our class to see which light and clay color would be best. We then started recording the second scene and combined the end result with the first scene, along with background music.

Phase 6: Abrupt end

We had to stop working on the project, because Kylian was about to do is intake at Sintlucas, which was why we did the project. We already had pieces of fabric and rope for the forest scene. But we never got to build it or record it.

Looking back

After making this process document, we realized there were a lot of things we could've done differently. We should get better at planning and dividing tasks. For the stopmotion itself, we should've moved the characters less each frame, so the end result would be smoother.

Endnotes

This is the end of the process.
Used software:

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