"Tape, Ball and Rain" is a 60 seconds stop-motion music animation clip used wooden figure and plasticine, mainly shot and edited through iPhone and iPad. The theme of this animation is going to be keep moving in an infinity world, the wooden figure stands for human being and the silk(made from plasticine) will be the metaphor of difficulties in life.
Animation Genre: stop-motion animated music video.
Screen Ratio/Size: 16:9/ 1080
Tools: huge white cardboard as background, iPhone as camera, iPad as monitor and editor, MacBook(if needs more editing)
Camera set-up: flexible based on shot design(see in the storyboard)
Lighting: LED light
Techniques-hand-made stop-motion animation-Materials: drawing figure, plasticine, hard wire(metal)
Describe the Look & Feel: the background is planed to use a huge white cardboard to create a infinity feeling of the surrounding, the wood color figure and the red silk feeling plasticine hopefully will create light contrast with the background. The camera design I chose is gonna be more cinematic, feels like real music video, although I haven't know how hard is gonna be to sync move and sound.
Form: Music Video Clip
Style: abstract but has particular object.
Sound: the music I chose is from bensound.com, which got the rhythm but not that much bass, it fade into more complex sound as time goes, which had given me the idea of the gradually emotion impact of the figure with the silk
TAPE, BALL AND RAIN
Isaac Ziyi Zhu
An abstract music clip of obstacle and life
Music from Bensound.com
China, 0'43"
In case the video above isn't playable:
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Q: What surprising (or otherwise) things did you discover about yourself as a creative practitioner during the process of making this animation?
As a part-time lighting assistant, by engaging with stop motion animation is really different from shot in actual scene, the camera, the setting, the entire process is differed from what I've experienced, I've found that to be a creative person(that's honestly what I think is the best to describe myself, but not a practitioner), the ideas may begin with huge amount of challenging stuffs, I've changed a lot from what I planned to do, due to different issues like, material, lighting, the figure I chose, all these lead to a total different project as planned, to be creative needs more flexible ideas, not to fix into something is essential in the future work.
Q: What would you like to improve or change about this project?
It was quite fun to do this, but I couldn't find the material I like to finish my work follows my planning, so I chose other material and moved on to a different aspect of animation. I reckon that I need to do more test shot before the project in the future. As part of result of remote learning, it is hard to have equipments that suit all the cases( like TRC giving all the lighting more flexible choice), the figure I used is also hard to move and fix in a position, I might like to find a alternative figure if I'd like to finish my original idea.
Q: What did you find pleasing or satisfy about your Animation outcome?
Although this project isn't identical with my planning, I've kept some ideas about moving shot from shot, I'm happy with what came out, the idea develops further from the original.
