Bird Cage Stop Motion

After the success of last time, we decided it would be effective to use stop motion again. One line in particular where we think it would work well is when Kate Nash sings 'and I'm trapped'. Although a short line, we wanted to emphasise the fact that she feels trapped.

So, my co-director and I had the idea of drawing a bird cage with a bird trapped inside, but to show the bird is 'trapped' we would use stop motion and show the bird moving as if it is trying to fly away. To do this, we had to take photographs of the bed moving position so we drew the bird on a separate piece of paper that could be moved.

Differently to last time, Chaya could draw the bird cage and  birds off camera and only had to show the bird moving, but the camera was still set up directly above the paper, on a tripod.

LunaPic Online Photo Editor

Once I had downloaded the 'trapped' font, I realised that it needed to be transparent or we wont be able to 'overlay' it onto the shot of the bird cage stop motion.

I decided to have a look online to see if there was anything that could turn a background transparent and I came across LunaPic which is a free editing program online!

It was super easy to use; you simply upload the picture and you just have to click on the part of the picture you want to become transparent and save it!

This could then be used on the bird cage shot! 

'Trapped' Font

With the stop motion of the bird cage, we wanted the word 'trapped' to appear when the lyric is sung. I used a website called dafont.com as it allows you to browse a wide range of fonts within certain categories, I looked in the horror section to see if there were any fonts that looked 'trapped'.

I found this one and thought it was appropriate so I downloaded it.

Stop Motion Finished!

Below are all the shots put together creating our stop motion shot! This is only the rough cut as the one in our final video will be sped up and be split up as it is too long to have as one shot.

Stop Motion

My co-director and I have always wanted to incorporate stop motion into our music video as we feel it works well within the indie-pop genre music videos.

After watching the trailer to the film, 'The Diary of A Teenage Girl' months ago, my co-director remembered a particular shot in which a still photograph of a boy is in the middle of the shot and flowers are drawn around him. 

We used this as inspiration and thought we could replicate this with our own drawings and a picture of the performer's ex-boyfriend. 

As I did the animation of Motion, my co-director decided to draw and take the pictures to create the stop motion. She stuck a piece of a3 paper to the table with blue-tack, also glued a photograph of the ex-boyfriend in the middle and set the camera up on a tripod - directly above the paper. 

Chaya drew flowers, hearts and other random doodles around the photograph, ensuring she took a picture on the camera after every line drawn! 

Here is what the final picture turned out like:

Final Motion Animation

After a lot of working out how to use Motion and experimenting with different ideas, I managed to create the animation we were aiming for.  I made the star spin, arrows bounce back and forth and the hearts appear one by one and enlarge - although very time consuming, it was worth it... even if it did make me realise how much time and effort it can take for a 2 second shot!

Here is the animated clip:

Colour Tool On Motion

For our star shape, I wanted it to spin around and have lines coming out from between the points, almost like a shine. However, obviously, I wanted the lines to match the colour of the star - I tried to match the colours motion provided, but they were either too dark or too light.

I then discovered a pipette next to the 'brush colour' selection. When I clicked on it, I realised that it would make the selected shape the exact colour of anything you choose on the screen!