The Decision To Place Stop Motion In Our Music Video (Jonny)

For our A Level Media project Josh and I really wanted to push the boat out and try as many filming techniques as possible, as to allow our music video to really stand out from the others. Something that we were both very interested in was the video effect of stop- motion. Our interest in creating a stop- motion sequence increased after both watching the following video on YouTube...


 

We came across this video when writing a blog post on similarities between our bands music video and that of Noah and the Whales. The girl that created this video was also doing A Level Media at the time. Knowing for sure that we now wanted part of our music video to contain a stop motion sequence, we then set about finding the best way to do this. A video that I found on YouTube gave us a good basic knowledge of how we should go about creating our stop motion...




This video was created by a group called 'storm the castle' who among other things educate people in different filming techniques. The advice given in this video- although quite simple made us aware of problems we did not anticipate occurring. The video also gave us one of the most important pieces of advice for our stop motion sequence, which was... USE A WHITEBOARD. I can not express how much time this saved us, as it allowed us to modify an image without having to draw it again from scratch (as in the Noah and The Whale stop motion). Haven taken on board the advice given, we set about creating our stop motion sequence.

http://youtu.be/uhrmCTcF7B8

This was our first attempt at our stop motion sequence. Although it was effective in terms of looking like a moving image, we were unhappy with the camera movement. This was due to the fact that images were taken holding the camera free hand, rather than using a tripod. Another error was lighting. By only using natural light our images were inconsistent, instead we should have used photography lights similar to the ones used in our green screen. Because of these errors we have decided to learn from our mistakes and reproduce the stop motion sequence, this time with tripods and lighting.