The models I made for my stop-motion college project achieved some excellent appraisal from the lecturers,they were impressed with my models even at the stage when they were just an armature and a foam body, my hunter character was probably the best, as for my squirrel I made that one several times, I experimented with various materials to make up the body but I found that a hard and light blue foam worked best because it could be easily moulded into the shape that I wanted and the plasticine that went over the top was put on really thinly because it stuck so well to the foam, this led to models that were really light and could be moved around and animated with ease.
Paris and San Francisco
when it came to filming, one of the lecturers advised that I film all of the different shots together so that the camera could remain in the same position, apparently in real life film, if they have various scenes in different parts of the world say Paris and san francisco,they will film the Paris scenes all together, and the San Francisco scenes together instead of going back and forth from country to country,so I took heed of this advice and started to film the scenes from a long shot viewpoint first. This was the first big mistake that I made because I was manipulating the models for the long shots it wasn't noticeable to the camera that the models were melting like chocolate in my hands and the detail on them was becoming less and less apparent. In fact the state of the models got so bad that I had to rebuild them, because when it came to doing the close ups they looked that rough and deformed you could barely make out there faces.
After I spent another weekend getting them up to scratch again aswell as doing any so-called freelance work I had going on, on top of another two projects, I was just so eager to start animating again.
One of the lecturers noticed that the models had changed and asked if I had rebuilt them, I assured her I hadn't which was not the case, but I didn't want her to worry that I had to start animating again from scratch as I had completed 13 and a half seconds of film already and I was ahead of the rest of the class.
The missing dope sheets
On Monday I managed to animate 10 seconds in a whole day, that was aswell as a client meeting which didn't go aswell as I had hoped, finishing a piece for the client and re-doing the two dope sheets that had miraculously gone missing in the course of last week .(I swear someone is sabotaging my work, but I cannot prove it) I didn't find out that dope sheets 10 and 11 were gone until I started animating a scene and I turned the page onto the next sheet and I saw that there was some lip-sync, were there wasn't before, so it was just a case of opening up my adobe premier pro file and re writing the two that had gone missing.
one of my lecturers had to have a quite word with me the other day, apparently a few of the students complained about me saying that I was criticising there animatic's but judging as I was the only one who had finished my animatic this just couldn't be true, how can I criticize something that I couldn't see, plus no-one would let me see how far they'd got with there's, we are encouraged to look at others work at college but if I try and do that I just get criticised for doing so, I'm not going to stop though because I'm genuinely interested with how others are doing I believe that as a team we should be able to motivate each other and learn from each other achievements not get all egotistical and jealous about it, plus I'm always there when people need help and believe me they do ask, and ill always oblige to it regardless.
