Statement of intent.

I plan on creating a short, maybe 3 minute long, stop motion animation based on the Grimm's fairy tale story of Rumpelstiltskin. To do this, I will be making four puppets, Rumpelstiltskin, the King, the girl and a peasant man, who will play two different small roles so I plan to make his character easily changeable. I will be making the puppets using a variety of methods and materials, including resin, silicone, foam padding, and I will be sewing their clothes.

I decided to adapt the original story slightly to make Rumpelstiltskin a little goblin and the king will have trollish features because I have made many human puppets and I wanted to challenge myself with more interesting looking characters.

Elliot Gascoigne has agreed to create my sets, but I will assist in painting them. I will also need to create or buy some props.

The animation itself will be hopefully around 3 minutes long.

In the story, a poor miller brought his daughter before the king claiming she had the ability to spin straw into gold. The king entertained this wild story by locking the girl into a room full of straw and demanding her to spin the entirety into gold. If she failed, she would be put to death. The girl began to weep at her fate until a small man entered the room and exclaimed he could do the task for her in exchange for a reward. She promised him her necklace, and the small man spun all of the straw into gold. The king saw what the girl had done and was astonished, but instead of letting her go, he took her to a new room full of straw and demanded she repeat the deed. There she sat unsure of what to do, and the little man appeared yet again. This time the girl promised him her ring in exchange for spinning the gold. The king saw the result and was again astonished. He took the girl to a third room, full of straw and pronounced that, if she succeeded a third time, she would become his wife. The girl sat in the room full of straw, and yet again the little man appeared; but this time, he demanded that if the girl became queen, she would have to give the little man her first-born child. The girl had no choice but to agree, and the little man spun the straw into gold with ease. The king discovered that the girl had succeeded, and they got married immediately. A year later the girl, now the queen, gave birth to a beautiful child. Shortly after, the little man appeared and demanded what was promised to him. The queen began to lament and cry so much that the little man gave her an opportunity to keep her child. The little man gave her three days to guess his name. The queen thought of every name she could, sent out messengers far and wide, but to no avail. But, on the third day a messenger returned who had stumbled upon the little man deep in the wilderness, dancing and chanting around a fire. It was there he learned his name was Rumpelstiltskin. So when the little man appeared for the last time to collect the child, the queen was able to guess his name. The little man was so furious that he tore himself in two.

I will need to find a way to convincingly make Rumpelstiltskin tear himself in two. This will be a challenge and will need a lot of practicing.

Ladislaw Starewicz- The Cameraman's Revenge. 1912

Ladislaw Starewicz was a pioneer in puppet animation. In "The Cameraman's Revenge", the characters were real dead bugs with  wire limbs. This made them easier to move around in stop motion animation. I really like this animation because, even though it's horrible with the bugs, it's really well done, the bugs have human mannerisms and I think it's just hilarious watching bugs driving cars or riding bikes. I think that, even though it was done in 1912, it is done in a way that would still be interesting and unique today and I think that's a really good quality in animation and art.

Matches an Appeal 1899

"Matches an Appeal" is believed to be the oldest existing animated film. It was done during the war to convince people to donate matches to soldiers. The video was done using stop motion and was revolutionary for its time.

Food about you -Alexandre DUBOSC

This is another beautiful example of stop motion by French animator Alexandre DUBOSC, using a mixture of materials (or ingredients). I like the thought that has gone into it and how none of the objects are how you'd expect them to be, for example the egg yolk in the syringe and the cake bar made of a card cut out.  I like the stop frame approach to the rabbits on the side of the cake as well, I think that is done really smoothly.

Studio Brief 4: Apply

For our final brief of this module, we've been 'let loose' and allowed to do make a 5-10 second animation using any of the processes we've learnt so far on this course. It can be about anything we like as long as it responds to one of the key words: Surprise, Lateness, Love, Hate, Longing, Happiness, Fear. 
I thought about the words and came up with a few ideas for Surprise, Love and Fear and storyboarded a couple of them before finally deciding on 'Love'. I did some character designing and worked out how my characters would spin in circles.

 The animation was to be 5-10 seconds long, but my idea for Love in the storyboard seemed to take a lot longer than the length of the animation in the brief, so I cut the story short a bit while making the animation, and my animation was still a bit longer than suggested. My animation tells the story of a girl in a music box who is bored and sad because she's all alone on the shelf, then a second music box is placed on the shelf with a boy spinning in it and the two fall in love and spin together. Originally one of the music boxes was meant to break and then the girl would be fixed onto the other music box so that the two characters spin together forever, however this would have made my animation closer to 30 seconds+ and that was too long for the brief. 
I used music in the background of my animation, because they're music boxes and it seemed silly to not have music in it... The song is the opening of an acoustic version of Alter Bridge's 'Wonderful Life'.

Originally, I had wanted to make my animation using photoshop, and I created a couple of scenes on it at the beginning of the week, however I found that this took a long time, as well as it not always being easy to find a computer and tablet in the mac suites at uni, and as my deadline was quickly approaching, I decided to create my animation using a light table, a peg bar and animation paper, as I had enjoyed doing this in the pendulum project, and it would be a lot quicker and meant I'd actually be able to get it done on time for the deadline as it meant I could work anywhere with a table. 

If I did it again, I'd put in different camera angles, like I'd wanted to in my storyboard, and I'd try to add more personality to the characters and maybe make the girl try to reach out to the boy in some way... 

Magic Water

This is a stop motion animation by youtube user Guldies, done using plasticine, among other objects. I love this animation, I think it's got a really clever use of physical objects and plasticine and I like how the animator has given the properties of water to plasticine. I think it's really well done. I also like how the sound effects reflect the shape of the object at the time, like it fits what the plasticine is meant to be. Overall it's just a really clever use of stop motion and effectively shows what you can do with it.

Tropicana Flip Book Advert

Full video here: http://vimeo.com/23182774

The Tropicana advert uses stop-motion inspired by flip-booking. Instead of the standard flip-book, they've done a photographic canvases pieced together and moving like a flip-book would. I love the bit about half way through, where the camera angle changed and the entire collection of photos opens up in different directions to make one large picture. 

I've used this as research for flip-booking, even though it isn't technically a flip book, because I can see some elements of flip-booking in it and it shows each stage of the animation clearly like in a flip book.