Month: November 2024

Filming Process

Throughout the filming process, the biggest aspect we paid particular attention to was in how smooth the movements were. As the biggest piece of feedback from our test animation was that our puppet’s movements were too “mechanical”, we placed an emphasis having the fox move in a smooth way. In our test animation, the primary issue was that we had no sense of timing when we were filming things. There was no easing in or easing out of movements and every movement happened at the same speed.

Because of this, improving the timing was a big priority in our filming. As we were filming, we paid attention to what actions or sequences would need more time or less time. By having different scenes take longer or go faster, we were able to heavily improve the animation as the important movements were emphasised and had more of an impact on the audience.

During the filming process we faced a few challenges in finding the best way to film. A notable challenge was in finding a way to move the puppet while still having to keep the puppeteer’s arms as hidden as possible. Through adjusting the lighting and the camera angles, we were able to find the best ways to minimise the background’s visibility and emphasise the subject on camera.

Puppet and story concept and creation

When we began designing our puppet, we approached it with the intention of creating a character with an iconic silhouette. With this, I designed the head of a character with sharp, angular features that would be iconic and be able to convey emotion. The result was that we made an anthromorphic fox-like character. We especially made a body that was human-like so that we could have a puppet with a large amount of mobility and flexibility to do all sorts of movements.

When planning our animation, our intention was to depict emotions with the fox puppet. By depicting human emotions, most notably anger and frustration, we would be personifying an inhuman character. We also sought to depict a transformation by having a bottle shatter and turn into a butterfly.

The main obstacle we had while planning our stop motion was planning the transformation as we were told to make it “dream like” yet we also needed to plan something that was feasible to do.

We created at least two ideas for the transformation. The first one was to have the fox kick a bottle out of frustration which would then smash into shards. The fox kicking the bottle would depict emotion with the character, and the bottle smashing would depict a transformation. However, the feedback we received was that it was too akin to something in the real world. Because of this, we created an alternate idea where the fox would take off its own head and smash it instead of the bottle.

With this, it would have depicted both frustration and depict something abstract. However, we decided not to go with this idea as it would not have been possible to create within the time span we were limited to. Because of this, we decided to go back to the original idea of a bottle being smashed. This time, however, we added to the story by having the glass shards the bottle smashes into turn into a butterfly. This would create a transformation that still depicts emotion and creates a “dream like” state.