It's finally done!!!! This was certainly a struggle project. I dived in enthusiastically and left battered and bruised. I had many issues with my lighting sources. I struggled to set them up to give the green background even light as to remove it later. Many shadows were cast which created an inconsistent color, problematic for keying out in post. My problems didn't stop at shadows, heat from the lights caused the Plasticine to melt, making it very difficult to animate the characters in the scene. (Side bar; the lights also melted the blinds in my apartment and that's no good!)
Once finished with animating all of the clay parts the post production became arduous. I created a few additional effects to tell the story. Morty, the male character, after suffering a heart attack is enveloped in coins over his dead body. It was a meticulous process to image by image animate coins to cover him. I edited over a hundred images to add the coins into the scene. This was done using Photoshop. All of the images, I then imported into Adobe Aftereffects and cut together and keyed out the green backdrop to create a white backdrop.
Once finished with animating all of the clay parts the post production became arduous. I created a few additional effects to tell the story. Morty, the male character, after suffering a heart attack is enveloped in coins over his dead body. It was a meticulous process to image by image animate coins to cover him. I edited over a hundred images to add the coins into the scene. This was done using Photoshop. All of the images, I then imported into Adobe Aftereffects and cut together and keyed out the green backdrop to create a white backdrop.
I found sound effects using some free royalty free services, www.freesound.org and www.bensound.com. Using my final sequence from Aftereffects, I imported it into Adobe Premier to add the sound and music.
Finally, done.
I learned a lot. I tested my patience, A LOT! In the end, I think it was worth it and although the look of the animation isn't up to my expectation, it still looks pretty darn good for having never attempted this type of animation before. I would be remiss to not thank the professors at ETSU who helped guide me to create this, so, THANK YOU, Jonathan Hounshell and James, Livingston. Also, I received helpful advice from my fellow classmates of the New Media Foundations Class, Karahann Kiser and Laura Osteen. This was an interesting project to tackle but quite rewarding in the end.
Just don't ask me to do a stop-motion for like, another 5 years or so.
