As the aim for this project was to have four animations, I decided to write down sections from the story that stood out most and summed up the story so that I could base my animations off of these.
I produced some initial sketches from my mind and thought about ways I could improve or develop from ‘Work,Play,Work’. I played around with the devil having a sharper jaw to look more evil and whether the horns would be outwards facing or inwards.
After sketching some ideas on things that could appear in my animations I planned out my first storyboard. I decided I was going to be working with Stop Motions Studios as I felt comfortable using this as I had previously used this app in college, so just needed to refresh myself. This was also because I struggled to understand how I would create one on Photoshop and thought this route would turn out best.
To create the lava for my first animation I created three abstract pools using the same three colours, so that when I changed each one in the separate frames, it would look as though the lava was moving.
I shortly learned that the process of stop motion animation was going to take a long time because of each small movement I had to do between each frame. Also the amount of pieces I was having to create and then carefully cut each one out.
Having many problems with lighting I tried positioning my set up in many places and ended up with sitting under the desk to block the light reflection on the black paper. I opted to go with a black background because my pieces were all light coloured and fair. However, after discussion I decided to try with a white background in the sun and I think this actually turned out better.
I wanted to base animation 2 on faces. This is because I think emotion is a key part of ‘A Short Stay In Hell’. It creates the atmosphere for the story. Focusing on the five guests, I played around with changing their emotions as the target of the animation.
I isolated two of the characters by only including their facial features because of a collage I did in ‘Work,Play,Work’. That collage stood quite powerful to me blocking out the others so I wanted to recreate that. This also helped me to save time as this one was even more fiddly as the pieces were even smaller so it was difficult when changing them within frames.
Animation 3 and Animation 4 I absolutely loved creating and was very pleased with the outcome. After making my first two animations, I was informed that you can create animations on procreate which I have never tried before so I was raring to give this a go. I ran into a few issues at first but that was just part of learning because I was completely new to this area of work. One of the struggles that took me a while to figure out was how to get more frames as I was limited to about 24. To do this I eventually figured out that I needed to change the canvas size and be allowed more layers. Therefore I have a tiny tester animation from where I went wrong.
I created my trigger images to be abstract so that it didn’t give away the animation for what the viewer was in for when they’re going to scan it, so that it was a surprise. I really didn’t think I was going to be able to have a final piece as I couldn’t get Artivive to work for the longest time. The reasoning behind this was:
- Artivive doesn’t work on iPads
- I wasn’t titling it therefore it wouldn’t save
- I wasn’t saving it
If I had more time I would create the trigger images better so that they ran more smoothly into the animation. I will definitely be giving Artivive another go now that I know some more basic things.