Introducing the iPool

A one week stop motion animation practice

ELEMENTS

Computer | Human Actor | Camera

TOOLS

InDesign | Dragon Frame

Credit

Together: theme design, story development, reference research, storyboard, stage setup, equipment preparation, filming plus the design of all the jokes in this video.

Tianyi Xie:

visual design for the desktop, icons
movement visualization (based on the reference)
movement stimulation
casting “hand assistant” (for 1 sec)

Billy Bennett:

movement reference research
casting “Jobs & his hand’” (he has to bend down and stay still for the entire afternoon. )
Sound Effect

Chenhe Zhang (Nick) :

contribute the idea (Each of us came up with our own idea before the first meeting, but all decided to use Nick’s idea because it’s fun and clever)
camera control (Dragonframe)
video editing

Timeline

Tuesday morning: idea Brainstorming_1hr,

Tuesday Night: Information Gathering_2hrs,

Wed noon: Concept Refinement_30min, filming the opening _ 2 hrs,

Thursday: Independent preparation before shooting, motion breakdown(Billy & Nick), Visual Design (Tianyi)

Friday: Filming the stop motion parts–

9-12 prepare the stage, 12-2 testing & lunch break, 2-7:40 filming.

Fri-Sat: Editing (Nick), Retouch(Tianyi)

Sat-Sun: Sound Effect (Billy).

Storyboard & Motion Guideline

Stage Setup

We rent the documentation area to control the lighting and stage set up. It took us a very long time to get things ready.

After the first round of test shot, we had to start over our table setup – the table reflection was too distracting, our solution was to add a black table cloth to reduce the reflection. We also tested much light setting to minimize reflection on the screen.

We connected an extra screen to the laptop, used a mouse and a keyboard on the mirrored screen to control the laptop with "iPool". Another laptop (with Dragon Frame) was used to control the camera.