Animation 1 - Wk 9 - My Experience with Hand-Drawn and Stop-Motion Animation

 In my experience of both hand drawing and stop-motion animation, I found that both are used differently to achieve the same result. Some of these differences have their benefits and drawbacks. I will be using my hand drawing flip-book and my stop-motion video as my two examples.

While animating this, I started with a circle and then slowly added more features and detail so it looks like a girl transforming. I was able to blur out the character and make the character do a flip with little effort. If I were to animate this as a stop-motion video, I would either have to switch the model into a blur or frame by frame make the character do a flip. Also, I am able to squash and stretch my character to make the motion look realistic but if I were to do a stop-motion, I cannot squash nor stretch the character, and even if I did, the model would deform and will take time to re-position and model the character again. Furthermore, if you were to make a mistake such as the character moves too fast or too slow, you can remove frames or draw more frames, however, for stop-motion, you need to start all over again. Finally, the character is in the air so if I were to use a model, then I would also need a support stand to make the character stay in the air then, later edit each frame using an editing software such as ‘Photoshop’.

What’s good about doing stop-motion animation is that I position the object then once I’ve taken the photo, I sightly move the object depending if the action is fast or slow. In other words, I don’t have to redraw the same object/model. Same applies to moving arms or legs, I only need to make the arms or limbs slightly instead of redrawing the whole model again on a different page. Another thing is that the model already have shadows due to the light in the room or the sunlight, but for drawing, I need to shade each frame from the direction I want to put the light in. Finally, for drawing I can only flip through three pages to make sure the character action goes smoothly, for stop-motion animation however, I just need to look through my camera or phone and I can see all the frames I’ve taken.

All in all, both hand drawing and stop-motion animation have their benefits and drawbacks but are used differently to achieve the same result.