Stop motion videos

http://mashable.com/2010/05/29/stop-motion-videos/

T-Shirt War






I thought this was a good idea to use for our own music video as this would illustrate the song while giving the audience more interaction. One of our ideas would be that we would use tee-shirts that have "Off The Radar" lyrics printed onto them. Another idea would be to add text to the software finalcut pro around different places, i.e the walls, flooring or just adding subtitles. This would help due to the uncertainty that our actors can perform on the day; it is also beneficial to use as we can add different fonts and colours while sticking to the conventions of the indie genre.

One video that uses this technique without any actors is Mika's Lollipop.


Scrabble







Again using stop motion we could use scrabble pieces to form our lyrics, this would illustrate and intensify the music.





Walkie Talkie Man by The Steriogram:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NqC77anXCc&feature=related





Stop motion videos such as Walkie Talkie Man can be seen as more creative compared to the average video. This is because directors have more freedom to create serialism and escapism, which is easier as actors may not be able to perform certain scenes due to mobility constraints. For example, in Walkie Talkie Man the location was made out of colourful wool, felt and other fabrics, to create a mini metropolis that is more likely to attract preteens to the imagination of one own's city; adding the 'Man' monster made from knitted wool to the metropolis.





This video would be seen as a repetitive music video, since this is soon viewed as more narrative meaning people could watch it again to see things that they had missed the first time round. However, the video is a contradiction to the lyrics as the lyrics is centred around a fat man who can run faster than the band. The video is given a more visual analysation. This takes the audience to another level of meaning, as they would be more interactive with the bright colours and characters compared to listening to the song on the radio; which will promote more interest for the song.



Stop motion takes time and effort for the final outcome to be produced and directors can choose from a chopped effect finish to a more clean flowing effect. We are allowed to use anything that can amplify, contradict or illustrate more of the latter to give a different effect.







We then created our own stop motion out of play dough. Creating cute food products we made a mini story about a bird protecting its "poo" pretending to be a malteaser in front of a carot, a rice ball, an omelette and a piece of broccoli.

We had found that brightly coloured character will be more attractive to the audience as they might deem them as more "fun but safe" characters from our childhood.

We did stumble across a few problems. The main one would be the camera, as it kept shutting down which consumed a lot of time. Also some of the playdough kept on breaking or falling off, due to dryness as a result of the amount of time we had to spend on stopping and moving the characters.

We found out in the end that the movie was going faster then we had intended. This was because we only recorded upto 2-3 seconds per shot, which means there was not enough camera time on particular scenes. If we had more time then doing around 4-5 seconds per shot would make the animation flow more smoothly.

This kind of stop motion animation can be linked to our music video as we can create our actors into mini playdough people, who can act out a scene that would attract and introduce the audience from live action to the freedom of stop motion; where we can add anything random that will fit our sub-genre of indie electro, indie pop and indie rock.