Slots - A Stop Motion Animation Production

What am I getting myself into? Stop Motion Animation.

Meticulous? Yes.

Time consuming? Of course!

Going to look awesome when it's done? You bet you ass it's going to look awesome...I hope.

I admire animation in any form it's presented, one way of animating in particular has always captured my attention and that's Stop Motion Animation! As I was gathering all my supplies for this venture I kept having to explain to people at Lowe's, Home Depot, and Michael's what the heck Stop Motion was. They still looked completely confused until I listed all the movies using this method. "You know you've seen em', The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicken Run, Wallace and Gromit, Box Trolls, and...Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer!!! for Pete sake you see that every Christmas. It's all Stop Motion Animation!"

Picture by picture, moving the characters slowly across the stage, what seems like magic when you see it all done on screen is a boat load of work!!!

So it is time to hunker down, lock myself in my apartment and go absolutely bonkers playing with these clay puppets I created.

The story, I think I will title "Slots", the plot goes like this, two old folk sit down at the slot machines both feeling lucky. One wins a little here and there and is happy with her winnings, while the other has no luck and goes down to his last coin. He pushes his last coin in, the reel spins and spins as if to never stop and reveal the result. Cherry, cherry, click, click, click, ever so slowing coming to a stop and BOOM, three cherries, JACKPOT! lights, noise, the old man grips his chest and collapses as the his winnings are spitting out of the machine covering his incapacitated body on the ground. The old lady is clam and looks over the pile of coins, she slowly reaches over and grabs one from the top, places it in her machine and continues to play....She really has a gambling problem. Any who, that's how I plan for it to go.

I've gotten quite a bit done already. So below is an on-slot of photos I have to share. Also, a small note, I've named them; Blanche and Morty.

Sketches....

Building their base structure/rig/armature.... 

Next, flesh i.e. Plasticine...

I gave each character an additional head so I can have a different emotion on their face.

Time to animate!

Pendulum in Space!

Another round of practice in Maya, this time our professor set up a pendulum for us to animate. We were to work on how the pendulum would move and carry it's weight as it swings. The door was kind of left open as to how you wished to animate your pendulum, so I decided to send it off to space! 

I wanted it to be animated as though there was no gravity as it would be were it actually in space, so I used the platform as the driving vehicle and the ball was more likely to be dragging behind and reacting to the platforms movement. Look out for the asteroids...

Bouncing Balls

Another exercise from my Fundamentals of Animation course. This exercise was to practice in the graph editor in Maya's software. Each ball was to represent a different weight of a ball. In my clip I went with a lacrosse ball and a soccer ball. Plus, for bonus points I added in a see-saw. One effect used on these balls is squash and stretch, this is one of the 12 principles of animation. When the ball hits the ground or another object, the force of it's impact will make the ball look as though it gets squished, when animated this way the bounces look more believable.

Fundamentals of Animation

Putt Putt, this was an exercise for my Fundamentals of Animation coarse. This is one of my first attempts at working in Maya. Our professor set up most of the parts and we were assigned place obstacles on the course and believably animate the ball.