Stop Motion Sequences

We originally intended the stop motion sequences to be done in collaboration with an animation student as not many of us had experience with the format; however he unfortunately dropped out late on so we had to complete it ourselves. As we knew we wouldn’t be able to replicate a professional piece of stop motion, we decided to go in the opposite direction and make it look more childlike and quirky. Chris and I chose to create cardboard cut-out backgrounds of the locations written in the script and started to animate them, using them in dream sequences where Daniel escapes reality through his imagination.

Lighting set and camera set up.

Framing of camera on card.

After taking 500+ pictures, I began importing them into Media Composer and labelling the beginning and end of each different background using colour markers.

I then changed the bin view that they were located in to Script View, which shows a thumbnail of the each clip, and highlighted all the pictures from the first background we wanted to animate.

I double clicked on the first clip, bringing all of the pictures into the source monitor where I pressed “4” on the keyboard followed by “o” to mark an outpoint on every clip.

I then dragged all the selected clips from the bin into the timeline so they were all one after the other.

As all these individual images are difficult to work with I compressed them into one clip by using Videomixdown on a selected part of the sequence.

This then compressed all the images together to make one easier to work with video track.

We’ve very happy with how the sequences have worked in our film by pushing the boundaries of reality into childlike wonder. The stop motion improves the theme of escapism and surrealism in the dream sequences as well as giving the feel good aspect of the film a boost.