This Week’s Readings:
Sound:
When it comes to creating, people always think about the story, and the pictures/video/designs needed to create it, but when it comes to sound most people only think about dialogue. In reality most times sound ends up being the most important part of a video. If you have terrible sound the video just won’t be good. While reading Animated Storytelling by Liz Blazer. She talks about not only importance of well recorded dialogue, but also layering your sounds with diegetic sound, which is a sound that comes from a source seen on screen, like a pot hitting the ground. And non-diegetic, which is a sound that is not seen on screen or typically associated to what is going on, like background music done by a symphony or a laugh track during a sitcom. Using both types of sound helps the audience feel like they are there with your characters in the moment and helps further convey the emotion of the scene.
Another huge tip that Blazer talked about when it comes to sound is that timing is everything. If you don’t sync your sound effects with the correct actions or the music starts to swell at the young time, the sound no longer helps lead the story, but instead will distract your audience and become a hindrance to it. When your editing sound repeatedly go back and see exactly what moment is most impactful for the audience. In order to see you can usually just nude the audio clip in one direction or the other frame by frame to find the perfect sweet spot.
Design Wonderland:
At this point in the text book we have gotten to the point where you can actually begin to create the world in your story. With this designing freedom Blazer talks about the need to still establish rules. These rules come with any world, like a time and place. Give your world something to ground itself in. Like if it’s a real time and place that has already happened to you have to keep the design relevant to that time period, or does the story take place in the future or on a made up planet in that case you have to design it to have your own specific look, but every object you put in that environment needs to have a purpose.
Another important set of rules would be the worlds physical rules. Like is there gravity and does it effect objects the same as on earth and if it doesn’t then your new laws of gravity need to effect every object the same way, you can’t change it for some things and not all things. For example on earth a brick will fall faster than a feather, but in your new world in might be the opposite, but in that case if lighter things fall faster, then when you push two people out of a car the lighter person should hit the ground first.
The next rules Blazer talks about for your new world would be social laws. In the society that your characters live in, is there a class system? Do the characters even have to follow rules or is it lawless? And you have to think about how these social rules will effect how the characters behave in certain situations.
The final and possibly most important set of rules you have to establish when designing your new world are the visual rules. Blazer talks about these laws being the ones that dictate what the actual world looks like. In the book she talks about a futuristic world being run by cellphones, so the worlds visual rules could be that everything is designed with desaturated colors and harder edges so it feels stiff and lifeless.
Designing can be a lot of fun and it’s extremely creative and freeing, but there still needs to be some sort of form and organization otherwise the extreme and crazy places you create will just feel unrealistic or too far fetched for people to actually buy into them when watching.
Sound Inspiration
- The first stop motion influenced my final stop motion a lot when it comes to sound. I liked the way that took creative freedom and made something that usually has a very soft and squishy sound and made it metallic sounding so that object felt more solid vs what it might look like with out the sound effect, which is mushy clay. In my stop motion I tried to use over the top sound effects that wouldn’t necessarily always be the first that came to mind when you think of each object.
- The second stop motion is honestly one of my favorites of all time, but with out sound it just wouldn’t have the same impact. Each animal has its own distinct sound and the noises they use to help convey each character emotions is incredible since both characters are actually inanimate objects that have no lines of dialogue. But with the sound you understand exactly what they’re trying to say.
Text Inspiration:
- The first text example is really fun to me, but it’s also something that I could see myself learning to make. It’s honestly just a bunch of lines being moved in scale and position and then fading out at the end. It would probably be very time consuming to animate from the ground up but it would be worth it in the end for the cool outcome.
- The second text animation is really cool. It’s a flicker effect as if the word was supposed to be a neon sign coming to life. It’s very artistic choice and if utilized for the right project could really make the beginning or end credits stick out to a person.
My Finial Stop Motion:
My final stop motion project, was very interesting to make. I utilize the non-linear version of storytelling a took a puzzle approach for the story. So I didn’t reveal the final goal of the stop motion until the very end.
One of the main challenges of the project was the fact that I wanted to be behind the camera to control everything and make sure it was all captured correctly, because of this though I had to use my younger sibling as the talent and trying to make someone move frame by frame and freeze when you need to move something is very difficult. This is why throughout the video some things shift a little weird since she was never exact on the freezing and holding still part.
Overall this project gave me a new found respect for artists who make extraordinarily long and seamless stop motions. Just this 30 second one took hours and still isn’t even remotely perfect. I honestly want to keep working in stop motion though since the transition possibilities are endless and really fun to come up with.
taylorsniffen.com 