Film manipulation

One of our project in this semester is multi-plane animation, which is a type of stop motion animation. We had three layers of glass to work on that helped us to reveal a nice looking depth of field, since we did Beijing opera characters in a outer space travel scene. Before I started working on this project, I thought it would be an easy and fun project. However, it was very tiring. I think it was because we did not have much time to shoot it and plan it more thoroughly. We tried to use many creative props to present different concepts, but it was not as easy as I thought. I think creativity is very important when doing stop motion animation planning. Since it's animation, one is not limited to what is put into the story or what is being used as props. In other words, you can go crazy with them. Thinking outside the box and using your imagination is important. Use PESfilm as an example: a broken computer motherboard could be filmed as a bird eye city view; sticky notes could be filmed as slices of butter and candies could be filmed as fireworks. Looking at general items in a different way and manipulating them differently in videos will get surprising and inventive result. The things that are least most expected to represent something other than what they truly are is where one's imagination can shine the most in an animation. It will be up to the audience to understand what the animator is trying to get across.