Applied 2: Plasticine Research

                      

As Hayley and I are going to experiment with plasticine stop motion animation, because I have never experienced this side of animating, I decided to look at some existing pieces in order to gain some ideas and inspiration for what we can do together.

The first animation I looked at was "Creature Comforts" by Aardmad Animations. I love Creature Comforts because it looks so quaint and handcrafted but at the same time it is humorous and educational. I personally feel like the audience is family friendly, which is a factor Hayley and I discussed for our topic of the Environment. Since we are all part of the environment I feel like it is important to have a larger audience, and because children are influenced by their parents, if they watch something like Creature Comforts with them, they are more likely to be absorbed by this information, if they see that their parents are also. 

Hayley and I both looked at the models in this animation and agreed that if we were to make characters, we would make the mouths separate to the bodies, and use a toothpick to attach them and interchange them, as this would allow our characters to aesthetically, be consistent, as well as it being for comforting for me who has never experienced modelling stop motion.

I also had a look at the background used within the animations and noticed that they are all hand crafted and very detailed. I am not sure if this is realistic for Hayley and I to go down this route, if anything we would have to make one detailed set, as we only have three weeks until our interim crit which requires us to have all our pre-production elements finalised. Because we are doing stop motion, this means models, sets and props as well as voices. I think this is a lot of work especially because there is just two of us and we have other briefs to do as well, however if we stick to our plan, I think it is achievable.

We are also thinking of having narrators like in Creature Comforts, however we are worried that it might be too similar. But this aspect is very appealing to us and we are willing to find actors or those we know with attractive voices to cooperate with us.

In conclusion, Creature Comforts has and will be a great reference source for our Documentary animation piece, and hopefully we will be able to take some influences from it and put our own original twist on it.