For the final project I rolled the dice that gave me nature, drawing and scanography. When I was thinking about what to do with scanography I couldn't help but feel like I wasn't going to get a final project that I was happy with. When doing the initial scanography assignment for this course I had fun making light trails and scanning in images but that is really all it felt like I was doing, scanning images onto the computer. I wanted my final to go beyond that and be something that I was excited about. One of my favorite things to learn about this semester was stop motion animation. I really enjoyed creating a stop motion and felt like there was so much I could do with the process. I came up with the idea of changing seasons and figured I could somehow combine scanned images and stop motion animation to bring this idea to life. I decide to draw simple images and cut them out like what I did for the stop motion assignment earlier in the semester because I was really pleased with the outcome. One of the issues I had with photographing the images though was keeping the light the same and keeping my camera still. This was an issue I didn't have to consider if I was using a scanner. However, nothing is ever as easy as it seems. I realized that I needed to think about how I could make this images backwards as scans are done face down and stop motion requires a lot of small movements, if an image makes a large move it will be clear in the end animation. I decided to tape a background to the top of my scanner as well as the key images that wouldn't move during the animation. About half way through my scanning process I decided to see what everything would look like when it was in the stop motion app considering I didn't have the onion skinning feature to help me or any frame of reference for whether the amount of scans I took would be enough. Unfortunately, when I added the images into the program the formatting was completely off. Half of my image was cut off and no matter how I changed the screen size it couldn't be fixed. This meant I needed to start the entire process over. The most annoying aspect of this was that I had taped images together and pulling them apart was difficult. A few pieces ripped a bit and all the color was taken off of the spots where the tape was. After scanning maybe 10 trials I finally got the entire tree to be visible when I uploaded it to the stop motion application. However, I now needed to recreate my background as there was almost no sky in the final image. Finally, I was ready to rescan my project. To make the leaves fall off the tree I needed to cut both the green and red/yellow/orange leaves off of it essentially meaning that if I messed up there was going to be a lot more time that I needed to reinvest into things I had already done. Luckily the only mess up was that one brach of the tree fell off as it was weakened from the amount of times I had to pull tape off of it to readjust my images. I decided that a cloud covering it up would be the best way to go about fixing this issue. Scanography as the camera for stop motion animation definitely has its positives, like the consistency of light and the steadiness of the camera/scanner. However, it also has its negatives. Like, when opening the scanner all the pieces get moved by the little bit of air that hit them. Or forgetting that half of your scanner is going to be cut out of the frame and scanning things in spots they'll be cropped only to realize after a few scans. Or that when you put down the lid to the scanner (where the background image is) you now have a cloud in the grass, something you realize once the image is already scanned. It is hard to think through all the minor things you need to do and it was definitely a learning experience for me. It is also very helpful to have the onion skin when using the stop motion application directly and I wonder if there is a way to get scans directly into the app as that would've been really helpful in this process. When adding the scans into the stop motion app I duplicated them all but wound up really having three or four of each image. For things I wanted to stay longer I added even more frames. I also slowed down the frames per second. I decided to play around with the snowman at the end, having him say something or using the facial features in the program to give him a different look. Ultimately I decided to stick with my original plan as I felt anything else took away from the concept of changing seasons, though I did give the snowman a mouth from the program. Overall, I am really happy with how the project turned out. I think that I was really successful in bringing my idea of the changing seasons to life.
Earlier versions of the final animation:
This was the first version I made. As you can see it is really fast and the snowman still has his original drawn mouth. After seeing this I decided to add more frames for each image and slow down the frames per second. I wound up making about 10 more versions and edited after each one. I wound up buying all the features in the program and that led me to trying out adding eyes and a mouth that they had as an option. I changed all the frames to be this updated version and decided I liked the original drawn eyes better and I went back and changed it again. Then I decided to play around with the snowman saying something and eventually melting which resulted in the video below. I made a bunch of versions of this animation as well, playing around with zooming in on the snowman's face, changing the way the mouth moved and having enough frames so that you could actually read the words that were written. I decided that I actually liked the animation better without all of this because it took away from the concept of changing seasons. However, I liked the little melted snowman in the credits so I decided to leave that in. It was an exploratory experiment that I am glad I did as I am sure I will incorporate these elements of the program into future stop motions I create.
Picture of what the scanner looked like:
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