5. Previous attempts by NCCA students in recreating CG based Stop-Motion
I went through a couple of reports done by previous students of the ncca who were inspired by old stop-motion movies. The reason to browse through these reports was to produce my own unique perspective on a genre of animation that has been around for decades, as well differentiate from the rather technical attempts put forward by the previous students. The first report called "Working with Ray" was not primarily focused on stop-motion but rather on human movement, gesture, body language and in a broad sense about what it means to be an animator. The report dwelled about the ability to create characters, to make them live and to make them laugh, which was a rather interesting read but dwelled very little on stop-motion or its replication through computer animation.
The other report called "stop-motion simulation" was a bit intriguing as it involved creating a "Mel" script which automatically modified the animation curves to stepped and randomised to produce jerky animation. The designer went around creating usual computer animation with flatten tangents in the graph editor, then using his Mel script which keyed every 2nd frame and made all the keys "stepped". He then produced another script that took all the key frames and randomised them with a control variable to choose how much jerky movements should be included in the animation. The abovementioned project was rather technical as it involved pressing buttons and tweaking codes to make the animation appear jerky. But I felt did not produce the key aspects of traditional stop-motion animation which is to play according to an animator’s artistic vision and strength. A "Mel" script called "Jitter bug" (downloaded) which I used for my project at one point, produced similar results according to this project, but did not produce necessary satisfying results for Stop-motion. I will be describing more about the script later.
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| Graphical representation of the Stickfas toy which was used in the project "stop-motion simulation". |
