Making the claymation

Making the animation was very frustrating and time consuming for many reasons. 

Firstly, the characters kept on falling over as they were top heavy. This made it hard for me to carry on, as I had to try and place the characters in exactly the same position as they were in before. This was extremely frustrating. 

The second problem was lighting. As the box was black, it was extremely dark during filming. I thought I had solved this problem by pointing a torch at the stage, making it look like a spotlight. However, this was too confusing as it was hard to hold the camera still, take a picture and hold the torch at the same time. In the end I ended up moving the set several times to try to find a place which allowed enough light in to carry on. However, as the day went on, it started getting darker and darker. This meant that the animation had different lighting in different stages and did not look as good as they could have if they had all been filmed in the same circumstances. 

Thirdly, the clay started going hard after they had been out for a while, making moving them even harder. The characters started losing shape and even started crumbling after manipulating them too much. As much as this was annoying me in the process of making the animation, when it was all put together it actually didn't look that bad. 

To make the animation I used Windows Movie Maker. I have used this programme many times before for a number of assignments so I already knew how to use it. This meant that no time was wasted trying to figure out how to work it. 

To take the pictures I just used the camera on my phone. The quality of picture on my phone is really good so this was not a problem, and I found that it looked better when I was using my phone than when I used a webcam. 

When putting the photos all together on Movie Maker I had to play around with the speed or a little while. This was to make sure that the animation as a whole ran smoothly and change to quickly or too slowly. This took quite a bit of working with but in the end It looked good.