Capstone Process

When I started on my capstone project, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do a video project that combined stop-motion animation with live-action footage. However, I didn't know where to begin or what I wanted to do the film over. So, I started to storyboard random things to get an idea of the story. After an hour of doing this, I finally settled on making the story about a flower and a ladybug. In the storyboard, a flower is living in a forest area. A ladybug flies by the flower, bringing waste and pollution. The ladybug is meant to represent how pollution caused by pollution and industrialization harms the environment.

After completing the storyboard, I went on to film the live-action portion. I chose to film in this wooded area near where I lived. Mainly because there is a lot of garbage and water drain around that area that would be perfect for the film. Along with that, I captured some trees and grass areas that were later incorporated into the film. Below is some of the unedited film footage.

Once filming was done, I started to make the puppets for the stop-motion portion of the film. To make the puppets, I decided to use felt fabric and wire. I cut up five pieces of felt for the flower and hooked them together with wire. Then to make the pieces stay together, I wrapped wire around them. This ended up creating the flower's receptacle and stem. As for the ladybug, I cut out a circle for the insect's base and two half circles for the wings. I cut out squares and used felt fabric sheets to represent the waste.

Once all the puppets were made, I moved forward with the stop-motion portion. I originally wanted to set each shot at eight frames/second. However, after testing the animation, I felt twelve frames/second fit the timing better. Each animation last about three to eight seconds.

The hardest part about doing the stop motion animation was figuring out the animation for the waste. I knew I wanted the destruction to affect the tree and the details of the environment. However, trying to guess where everything would be was tricky. Once everything was finished, the tree and some environment animation looked all over the place. Due to this, it was hard to composite the animation files onto the film footage in Premiere Pro. So, I had to move so of the editing to Adobe After Effects.

By moving the compositing to Adobe After Effects, I could fix some of the issues in the original animation files' sizing, timing, and color balance. However, I had to redo the entire animation in After Effects for some of them. Mainly the shots that featured the tree and water drain. Yet, this allowed me to add some things to the scene -- such as the animation of the leaves in the water drain scene -- and make the animation smoother. This also allowed me to change the felt color from oranges and reds to gray tones.

After all the After Effects scenes were composed and edited, I could finally move to Premiere Pro to piece it together.

Once editing was done, I added music to the project to go with the film's tone. For this project, I chose "Fires in the Night of Istanbul," a dark cello song from the Middle East.