Published posts

I published all my posts on the same day, as I kept them as drafts to go over at the end, to make sure they were all coherent and linear.
I have found keeping a blog much easier and better to keep up to date with. I find sketchbooks quite hard, and seeing as most of my work has been on a computer, I can add things to the blog as soon as I've done the work.

Problems

After I'd figured out what I wanted to do for my final piece (about a few days before hand in) I ran into some problems. 

Certain parts of the sound effector tutorial I followed didn't seem to work. The software was not allowing me to add texture to my shapes. I tried for hours to figure it out, to no avail. I even asked people in my class for their advice, the only people who knew how to use Cinema 4D.

I also had problems with my sound files - my WAV. file formats weren't working in C4D for some reason.. Even though the software supported my previous wav files. I figured it out in the end, after a few hours - it turned out that the sample rate was too high, so I had to edit and convert them so that they worked..

By this time, the texture problem still wasn't working out, and I didn't want to spend many hours making this animation, if it wasn't going to work out how I expected. It turns out that using new software can let you down...

Final Piece Final Idea

Even though I originally wanted to make a stop motion music video, my idea changed pretty drastically towards the end - it would no longer be a music video. 

After I started playing with Cinema 4D, I got told to test its possibilities by recording 'soundscapes'. It was now more to do with synaesthesia than it was in the beginning. So I decided to make it 'a day in the life of a synaesthete'. 

I recorded sounds throughout my day, and I was to pair these sounds with certain shapes in C4D, and give them different colours and movements based on the types of sounds. So I would still be in keeping with the pairing of colours/shapes to frequencies etc.

Here is a list of the sounds I recorded and the shapes I want to pair them with:

Kettle - little spheres, like bubbles

Toaster - one small disc on its side, moving up and getting bigger as toaster 'pops'.

Door opening/closing/locking - Icosahedron 

Footsteps down stairs - two discs getting bigger with the loudness of each step

Skateboard - torus (a ring) spinning around like a wheel

Lift at uni - tube, going up and down

Writing with pen - cone (lengthening, getting sharper with scribbles)

Typing - cubes (cuboids)

Photocopying - cylinder (horizontal, moving sideways with sounds)

Then the sounds can start to build up, one over the other:

Lift again

Skateboard again

Door again (coming back home)

After the door is heard closing, all the sounds stop.

Then:

Brushing teeth - small long capsule, moving sideways

Rain on window - tiny pyramids upside down, falling up and down to look like rain

Then the rain sound will fade until the shapes and sounds stop completely.

Here is a link to all my sound files that I prepared for this

sounds

Soundscape

I decided to record some sounds around the house - I made sure I tried to get different frequencies. I clanged glasses with tweezers to get high pitched sounds, and I also hit the body of my guitar to try and get lower notes. I decided to get lower frequencies by playing bass notes on my guitar.

With these sounds, I then tried to make the shapes be effected differently. I like that you can visually 'see' each individual sound in this test. However, I could have made it better, by making them more dynamic, maybe using more than one clone per sound. I could have also put interesting textures and lights on them - but it wouldn't work.

My Song

In order to separate a track into the instrument components, so I can make each instrument be effected differently, I decided to make my own song in Garageband. I just used the loops it came with, and recorded a few riffs on my guitar. This made it easier for me to play around with the settings in the sound effector. 
The song is nothing to be proud of, it was just so I could play around in C4D. This is what I came up with:

Cylinder Effector

I tried another version of the sound effector, using the 'spline tool' to create a circular set of shapes.

Frequency test

I wanted to see if I could get different shapes to do different things to the same piece of music.. I had a play around with the frequency filter - you can choose which frequencies and bandwidth you want the shape to be effected by:

The only problem with this filter, is that the frequencies of different instruments overlap, so I wouldn't be able to get each shape to visualise the sounds of each instrument..
I chose a dark blue sphere for the bass notes, such as the bass drum and guitar - I then selected the lowest frequencies with the filter.
I chose a cube for the higher drum notes (the 'clapping') such as the snare - and chose a different set of frequencies for this.
I then tried to get the piano part to be effected differently - I chose a pyramid for this. Unfortunately, the frequencies for this part aren't different, so it does pretty much the same thing as the cube..

Here is my frequency test:

Alt version

I tried the sound effector with my song again.. This time I achieved some of the effects I wanted, such as reflection and nice lighting. However, the lighting was quite difficult, in the tutorial he uses his own lighting which isn't available on my version of C4D.

My First Cinema 4D Tutorial

So I decided to try out the sound effector tutorial in C4D, using the song I want to use - Muy Tranquilo by Gramatik.

Here it is

I couldn't achieve a couple of the things he does towards the end of the tutorial - such as add nice lighting and more reflection. But I think generally, it looks quite good. I just wish there was more variation in the movement - but this is most likely down to the frequencies of the song, not the software.

Synaesthesia music video

Synesthesia by James Lashmar, 2014

I stumbled across this video when searching for synaestetic music videos on YouTube. This is exactly the type of thing I want to do with my music. I love how the shapes interact with each other as well. I am not too keen on the camera angles though. I like the first part best.

I showed this video, along with a few other stop motion music videos, at a tutorial. I said I'd love to be able to do this kind of thing, but wouldn't have the slightest clue how. A guy in my tutor group told me about a Cinema 4D tutorial that shows you how to do this type of thing. 

Luckily, a week before, I finally received my new (reconditioned) laptop, which has ALL the software on it (finally), including Cinema 4D!

Visual Music video

I just found a Norman McLaren-esque video on YouTube. It shows the type of thing I want to do - pairing certain types of sounds to shapes and colour.

My turn

I downloaded the iMotion app, and bought an iPhone tripod so I could try out my own stop motion animations at home. I wanted to test out trying to move shapes in different ways.

PES

This guy.

Fresh Guacamole, 2013

Adam Pesapane (born 1973) is an American director and stop-motion animator. He has directed many short films and commercials since the early 2000s. His 2013 short film Fresh Guacamole was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, which makes it the shortest film ever nominated for an Oscar. 

His signature style is his use of everyday objects to tell interesting and/or funny stories through stop-motion animation.

PES has cited Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer as an influence on his work.

I have loved the work of PES for years, and his style of animation and storytelling makes me want to learn and explore stop-motion. I really enjoy all his short films, but I think my favourite is Roof Sex, one of his earlier creations. It is just so funny and clever.

Roof Sex, 2002

Apparently, Roof Sex was in fact PES's first animated film. It must have been pretty popular, as it was featured at over 100 film festivals worldwide and won many awards.

They say stop-motion is time consuming - this one minute long video took 20 days to shoot!

Another great animation of his, is Human Skateboard, made as a commercial for Sneaux Shoes. This type of stop motion has been done many times, but this may be one of the first.

Human Skateboard, 2007

It is not just short films and commercials that PES has written and directed, he is also developing two feature length films, so keep your eyes peeled.

90s videos

In the late 80s and early 90s, my dad was working at The Hacienda in Manchester. At first he was a lighting technician, but then he went on to direct music videos with two of his friends, under the name Swivl films.

I told him I was making a stop motion music video, and he showed me a few videos he made over 20 years ago, which utilised animation.

A Guy Called Gerald, Voodoo Ray, 1988

808 State, Olympic, 1990

Kiss AMC, My Docs, 1990

Full Intention, America, 1996

My dad's friend, John Clayton, directed the video below - it utilises stop motion to cleverly animate the TV to play in real time.

Bassheads, Back To The Old School, 1995

Different Music Videos

Whilst researching stop motion music videos, I came across a few bands that I've never heard of, with some very interesting and different styles of stop motion...

Push pins and thread

Cassette tapes

Story in a bed

Terrible song, brilliant video
This video impresses me the most, as it utilises loads of different styles of stop motion. It must have been so difficult and time consuming to make...

Toast
Although it may not look it, this video is very impressive. It is different to any other stop motion video I have seen, which makes it great. It must have taken so long, and used up so many pieces of toast! I hope they didn't let all that food go to waste...

Paper shapes
I love the first part of this video - the paper shapes stood up and animated. It is something different.

Here's a list of some of the 'most epic music videos featuring stop motion animation'

Music Videos

I am not looking to tell a story through stop motion, in fact, I want to make a music video - or rather, make a stop-motion video to music.

There have been many brilliant stop motion music videos through the years, and here are a few I think deserve to be seen

The White Stripes, Fell In Love With A Girl, 2009

The White Stripes, Hardest Button to Button, 2009

Glass Animals, Exxus, 2013

Glass Animals, Pools, 2014

Another musical artist I love is Chet Faker, who's music video for Talk Is Cheap used stop-motion to go through the four seasons. It is brilliant.

Chet Faker, Talk Is Cheap, 2014

Fleet Foxes's video for Mykonos utilises stop motion to animate simple geometric paper shapes, which is the aesthetic I would like to achieve.

Fleet Foxes, Mykonos, 2009

Vice's opinion on the best stop motion music videos

For Kids

We must not forget that cartoons are (mostly) for kids. And there are certain children's stop motion series that have been very popular.

In the mid 1980s, Swiss animator Otmar Gutmann began collaborating with writer Silvio Mazzola on a claymation show about a penguin living in Antarctica, Pingu. The show has had international success because of its lack of dialogue (the characters speak in penguin honks, or "Penguinese") and its simple, often quirky stories which can be easily understood by youngsters in any country. 

I remember seeing this scene when I was younger, 

and this video has managed to get 20,582,337 views on YouTube!

Up to this point, there have been 157 episodes of Pingu, and there has even been spoofs of it. A few years ago, I came across Chav Pingu on YouTube. 

There is another children's stop motion series that I came across a couple of years ago, named OOglies, produced by BBC Scotland for CBBC. It first aired in 2009 on both CBBC and BBC HD, and is still shown on TV now. The programme involves short, funny sketches of inanimate objects such as household items and food, all with googly eyes on, doing silly things around the house. There is no dialogue, only sounds they make, which means the audience can interpret what is said between the characters.

Norman McLaren

There is a certain filmmaker that I believe deserves his own post. Norman McLaren (1914-1987) was a British/Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of fields within video - hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.

He won many awards in his time, among the most notable: an Oscar for the Best Documentary in 1952 for Neighbours, a Silver Bear for best short documentary at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival for his short film Rythmetic, and a 1969 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Pas de deux.

I first found out about McLaren when I was researching visual music for my previous project and for my dissertation. He is most well known for his experiments with image and sound - he developed some techniques for combining and synchronising animation with music. I was particularly interested in his drawn-on-film animation, especially his videos Dots and Blinkity Blank.

Dots, 1940

Blinkity Blank, 1955

Boogie Doodle

Spook Sport

I did not realise that McLaren was well known for his stop motion, as well as his hand drawn animation.

I actually didn't know that his short film Neighbours won an Oscar, but after reading about it, I'm not surprised he did.

Neighbours, 1952

This short is actually an anti-war film, inspired by his year long stay in China, where he witnessed the beginning of Mao's revolution. The film uses the technique known as pixilation, where live actors are used as stop motion objects. Interestingly, McLaren created the soundtrack of the film  by scratching the edge of the film, creating various blobs, lines, and triangles which the projector read as sound.

The Dark Side of Stop Motion

When you think of gothic, quirky films or animations, one would most probably think of Tim Burton's films. However, there were other filmmakers who made animations in a dark, gothic style before him. Steven and Timothy Quay, are American identical twin brothers, best known as The Brothers Quay. They moved to England in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, and are now known as some of the most influential stop-motion animators.

They have a dark, fairy tale-like quality to their work, and are also influenced by European animators, writers and composers such as Walerian Borowczyk, Franz Kafka, Wladyslaw Starewicz, and later Jan Svankmajer. Their films are almost exclusively without dialogue and they almost always make their films to fit a pre-existing score rather than vice versa. This has led to them, more recently, making music videos for artists whose work they like. 

The Quays' work is very complex, not just because of its multi-layered, esoterical nature, but also because of its technical intricacy, which often requires them to use tweezers to infinitesimally adjust the tiny objects they are animating.Their most famous works include The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, their only feature so far, and the short Street of Crocodiles, which was considered by Terry Gilliam to be one of the ten best films ever made.

Some other studios that make dark stop motion videos:

Bolex Brothers

Robert Morgan

70s, 80s and 90s

Stop motion was used in the 70s and 80s for special effects for huge films such as the original Star Wars trilogy. The company Industrial Light & Magic used this technique for scenes such as the chess sequence in Star Wars, the Tauntauns and AT-AT walkers in The Empire Strikes Back, and the AT-ST walkers in Return of the Jedi.

AT-AT walkers

There are other famous films that used this technique for special effects: The scenes including ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the first two feature films in the RoboCop series, and some of the shots for the final sequence of the Terminator movie.

Ghosts in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Another notable filmmaker using stop motion in the 80s, is Czech Jan Svankmajer, who mixed stop motion and live action. These include Alice, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Faust, a rendition of the legend of the German scholar.

Alice, 1988

Despite the advancement of other forms of animation, as well as the success of animated cartoon films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, there has still been an increase in the number of traditional stop motion feature films. One of the most famous stop motion features is The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick and produced by Tim Burton in 1993. Henry Selick also went on to direct James and the Giant Peach and Coraline, and Tim Burton went on to direct Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie, all to high critical acclaim.

Nightmare Before Christmas

James and the Giant Peach

60s and 70s

Many artists and filmmakers continued to experiment with stop motion throughout the 60s and 70s. This is when entire series and motion pictures were starting to be made using stop motion.

Norman McLaren was still making stop motion films with the National Film Board of Canada, and had also brought in many other animators to create their own creatively controlled films.

Another well known stop motion animated series from the 70s, is The Moomins, created by Finnish woman Tove Jansson. This series was based on the many Moomins books written by Jansson.

One of the most famous companies to start around this time, is Bristol based studio Aardman Animations, Ltd., who brought us Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run. It was founded in 1972 as a low budget project by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who wanted to realise their dream of producing an animated motion picture. In 1976, they created the Plasticine character Morph, who first appeared as an animated side-kick to the late TV presenter Tony Hart on his BBC TV programme Take Hart. Morph also appeared in children's series SMart.

Tony Hart with Morph

Morph 

In 1985, Nick Park joined the company, and in 1989, created the short film 'Creature Comforts', which was the first Aardman production to win an Oscar.

Aardman films have now made $971.8 million worldwide and average $162 million per film. All of their stop motion films are among the highest-grossing stop-motion films, with their debut, 'Chicken Run', being their top grossing film as well as the highest-grossing stop-motion film of all time.

Special Effects

Although Emile Cohl brought stop-motion over to America in 1908, it wasn't until much later that the animation technique became more well known to the public. And this was mainly down to one man - Willis O'Brien. 
An ex-newspaper cartoonist, he had been hired by the Edison Company in the mid-1910s to make short films on prehistoric subjects, and in 1925 had worked on his first feature The Lost World. Known for his talent of animating creatures for special effects, he managed to get a job working for King Kong in 1933. This film was extremely innovative for it's time, although it may not seem it nowadays. For the film, O'Brien integrated the stop motion sequences with live action footage.

Another influential person in stop motion, was O'Brien's protégé Ray Harryhausen. Having been hired by O'Brien to work on the 1949 Mighty Joe Young, he stepped out of the shadow of his master and is now known as a household name in stop motion. Harryhausen perfected many of the techniques that O'Brien had originated, including trying to integrate the animation into the fabric of the film as seamlessly as possible. He created DynaMation, which split the live action footage into the foreground AND background shots, so that he could "sandwich" his own work into the very centre of the film. This forward thinking way of working finally won him the Gordon E. Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions in 1991.

After this, stop motion became more and more inventive, and more and more seamless. So now we have entire stop motion animated feature length films, that you wouldn't know were made in this painstaking way.

The originals

Some track the origin of stop motion back to 1896, when Georges Méliès' camera jammed. When the film was developed, it showed objects magically disappearing on screen.

It is thought that the first stop-motion animated short was 1898's The Humpty Dumpty Circus, by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. This animation was made using Thomas Edison's Vitascope. Sadly, the film has been lost, but other works of theirs survived.

http://trueclassics.net/2011/09/03/pioneers-of-animation-j-stuart-blackton/

I found an online article with a short history of Stop Motion, here it is:
http://www.focusfeatures.com/article/a_short_history_of_stop_motion

And here's a brilliant little stop motion about the history of stop motion:

According to the above video, it is thought that the first animated films were by Emile Cohl, of France, in 1908

Fantasmagorie, 1908

The Puppet's Nightmare (Le Cauchemar de Fantoche), 1908

However, as mentioned above, it was J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith who made the first animations. Thomas Edison (yes, the man who invented the lightbulb) had invented one of the earliest film projectors, the Vitascope. Blackton and Smith set up the American Vitagraph Company, and began producing their own pictures.

Here are a couple of the earliest animations, released by The Thomas Edison company.

Fun in a Bakery Shop, 1902

Humorous Phases of Funny Faces

I found another great early animation, this time from Europe, from Ladislaw Starewicz (or Vladislav Starevich, Wladyslaw Starewicz, Владислав Александрович Старевич) who was born in Russia to Polish parents. He is known as a Russian, Lithuanian and French stop-motion animator, notable as the author of the first puppet-animated film. He famously used insects and other animals as protagonists of his films.

The Cameraman's Revenge, 1912

In the same year, 1912, one of the first clay animation movies was released to great critical acclaim. It was called 'Modelling Extraordinary', by Walter R Booth.

In 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, started experimenting with clay stop motion. She released her first film in 1917, Romeo and Juliet.

What am I doing?

This is a question I ask myself a lot. 

But I sort of know the answer this time!

I want to learn more about, and create, a stop motion animation.

Not just any animation, but one for a music video.

I originally wanted to ask one of my musical friends/family to make me a track without vocals (as I don't want to overcomplicate things.) However, I think I may have decided on a track that I love, that I could listen to over and over again without getting bored.

Anyway, this blog is to upload all my research, experimentation, and development towards a final video.

My research will not just be on visual music, but all sorts of stop motion, as it interests me a lot.