STOP! Stop motion time.

Animagine! They’re a company that teaches students how to do animation. I was invited to a session on stop motion via 24 Seven to do one. WHICH STUDENTS THOUGH? OHOHOHOH. They’re the guys who are one of those who teach students to do stop motion for the N.E. mation 5 competition.

Alright, I said I wanted to do the workshop because I totally know stop motion is hard and wanted to see how they’d teach us! For one thing, I totally knew a lot about N.E.mation since when I graduated in doing all these… THEY HAD THE COMPETITION AND I WAS LIKE WAARGH since I was out of school then. No matter, I was over qualified. Still, I had watched the animations ever since the first competition when they screened it on TV Mobile (which is now defunct so you won’t see the animations on the bus 🙁 ).

What’s really cool is that with each new round of the competition, the style and techniques improve like woah. Which is pretty understandable since technology upgrades etc still, animation is animation.

No matter how high tech you get, it’s still frame by frame.

The staff who are teaching us. For that evening we were using Animaker! It seems like a PC based software so that’s cool. My partner for the evening was Chrispytinetoo!

Our tools for the evening! We were to do a VERY simple short animation of two worms!

This is my worm. The hussy. Or something. You can see her dragging her flowers away. You’ll see what I mean when you see the video at the end of this.

The cast for our animation!

Ok see, animation CAN be quite fun. Tedious but fun. Everyone else got into it, making their own worms and started to animate their own stuff in their teams, heh.

So we did our story! For those who don’t know, 24 frames per second is a standard for animation. Well, some people use 30 frames per second but let’s not be ridiculous since we’re just doing this in a few hours. Since this wasn’t going to be something super serious, instead of doubling up our frames, we quadruple it. HAHAHA. So hence it’s not as smooth as it should be.

Ok so you know when you watch the student’s animation? YEAH, they have to do like at least a minute or so of animation to tell their story.  In other words, if you need to do one minute of animation it goes like:

25 x 60 = 1500 frames = OH MEIN GOTT!

Good grief. 1500 frames which means 1500 pictures which you need to make sure the lighting, setting and everything would be the same while the characters move. One wrong move and you’d probably go, “NOoooooooooo” and have to fix things up again.

And what I read of the students’ requirements is at least 3 minutes of animation. Thus:

1500 x 3 = 4500 frames

So, so tiring. I did frame by frame animation before for real school work and other projects. Well, I did more with frame by frame animation of 3d and 2d. I didn’t want to do stop motion cause of the whole if you move the wrong thing or break something, YOU MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO FIX IT. It’s just that much of potential to mess up. So for the N.E.mation groups? REALLY tons of luck to you guys!

Especially when teamwork is needed for it. Heh.

Alright, so this was ours. I wanted to put sound on but my main computer of editing is needing to be fixed. ALAS, just imagine music and sounds a hussy worm would make. Probably something in the lines of “OH YOU HOT EATER OF LEAVES YOU!” or “OH YES, DECOMPOSE THIS LEAF LITTER WITH ME” etc, etc.

Heh, thanks for 24 Seven, Animagine and Nexus who organized this! It was fun learning what the students were doing for the competition. I’m so glad to learn that the students are still going to go through so much effort to do their animations like I’ve done before ages ago. BWUAHAHAHAH! At least animation techniques don’t change even if technology does.

What counts in making a good one is stubbornness so for the teams competing, keep on till the end! And don’t fall over on the tables with your stuff on.

Ps. The one below is what I did in 2004 in my year 1 using iStopmotion, a mac based stop motion software. This wasn’t anything serious too from what you can tell of the insanity of the story.

Pps. Check out the N.E.mation website for more updates on the competition!

Ppps. Check out more photos of that evening here! Hahaha.