I am studying Illustrated and animated storytelling at St. Joost. In our third year we had to do a minor so I chose a new Stopmotion Minor! I always have a hard time animating because of the amount of working with computers. But I still really like animation. So that's why I chose to do Stopmotion, so I could still experiment with materials and not work with computers too much.
2023 - 2024
What did I do?
These are the roles I took on during this minor:
Storyboarder
Character designer
Concept artist
set designer
I also made / animated the:
Dragon puppet
Dragon Wish
Computer Wish
Star and Space scenes
Before we start...
Before the minor started we had to make a little introduction video about who we are and why we wanted to study stopmotion. The video had to be one minute long. I chose to make a paper puppet who looked like me and animate it. I chose to show my sketchbooks because I feel like that gives a good view about who I am and what I enjoy to do. I made this video in a very short time and really enjoyed making it!
Stopmotion can get a mess very quickly as you can see... Haha :)
First things first!
Before the groups were formed, we started of with the basics of stopmotion. In the first week I made this little puppet of myself! My first stopmotion puppet. It was quite difficult to get the skeleton right and find out which materials work best for what part you're going to make, so it was a great start to figure stuff out before the real thing! When we all made our puppets we practiced other parts of stopmotion like animating with the puppets, lighting the set, using the camera's and programs and all other kinds of stuff.
Pre- Production
When we eventually made the groups we started talking about what we wanted to get out of our minor. The conclusion we came to is that we just wanted to do as much as possible, al different kind of techniques, materials and story. So that's why we chose a very chaotic and bizar style, so we could do whatever without it feeling weird within the world we wanted to make. The idea of wishes came to me pretty quick for the same reason, no limits! Also so we could have people telling stories and animate those all in different ways. A big inspiration was therefor the midnight gospel with its bizarre characters and colorful worlds and stories. We interviewed some people to gain some stories and inspiration, took our favorite wishes and ideas and I started sketching en storyboarding!
We had considered many ideas, wishes related to love, food, people's biggest fears and lots more. But we finally decided to chose a set of characters seeing a falling star and discussing what each of their wishes would be. The last person would wish for the end of all of this discussing and fighting and the world would explode, the end! But even then we had to storyboard lots and lots and characters changed or got scrapped. For example, the star was first also a character but we changed that to make it less complicated.
I loved this part the most. Making storyboards, discover how the characters would interact and what the camera movements could be. I could just experiment a lot and explore lots of different ideas.
Production time!
When we got a clear vision about what we wanted we could start making stuff! But we first needed to figure out who's going to have to what part. I got the job of making the Dragon puppet and his wish, the Computer's wish and the scenes of the star and the title. I also helped with other people roles like making the faces of the robot puppet and helped with parts of the set.
The paper animation from the money wish was a lot of hard work but I really enjoyed it. I loved cutting up lots of printed money and sorting it on color and trying to make puppets and backgrounds. I wrote a big part of the script and helped with recording the voice actors so it was also very satisfying to see that come to life.
The computer character was my favorite and I wanted to take a swing at pixelart for a while now so I absolutely looooveddd making the Computer wish. I first made lots of pixelart version of our Computer puppet to practice with pixelart and to get to a design i could animate. So when I had the final version I made a digital animation, bought magnetic blocks and painted the metal wall in our studio green so i could animate on it. That stopmotion animation would then be layered over my pixel background and over the puppet on the set so it would look like a kind of videogame. And that scene is honestly my favorite.
We had a vision for every part of our stopmotion film except the space scenes. We also planned the least amount of time to make those scenes so I kind of had to make something I could finish in a very short amount of time but also something that would be different from the other parts of our animation. So i wanted to use different kinds of paper because that's pretty in my comfort zone but I chose to animate the paper frame by frame to make it still a bit new and challenging for myself. I loved working with these materials and I think the results look very solid!
The expo
I had basically nothing to do with the editing, sound design or other post-production stuff, so i focussed on the expo and how that would look. I also invited lots of friends and family to show them our project. I absolutely loved working on this project and finally having a finished project to be proud of.
When we were in the pre-production fase everyone told us we couldn't make this animation in this short amount of time but we just worked our asses off and did it! It definitely was not easy but it was so fun, challenging and fulfilling to do.
I really gained a new love for stopmotion as a medium. To be busy with your hands and make something come to life in that way is fascinating and I would definitely want to work on more stopmotion projects in the future.
Playgrounds TAD Eindhoven 2024
Our project was chosen from the minor to be exhibited at playgrounds! We were so honored to be there between all of the amazing artists attending and it was amazing to show of this project that we spend so much effort and passion for.
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