Filming

Today we began capturing the footage for our animation, we decided to film in chronological order, meaning that we would film from first to last scene. On the first scene, I took a back seat and allowed Jake to move the character, as he has had more experience with it that I had. We swapped for the second scene, with Perry doing the most animation, as he had also had more experience, I animated the character for the final scene, which happened to be the longest and most tedious scene we had to film. It was easier than I expected to begin with, but the third scene has some awkward movements in it, which soon made me realise why it had previously annoyed other groups in the production process. The clay began to get soft under the heat of the light and the wire frame soon began coming through the clay, after a few patch jobs to make it look as good as new, we ran in to another troublesome moment, in which we had to make the character fall over. This one second of real time footage took us longer to produce than the whole two other scenes. It would simply not fall over realistically. After attempting to use small pieces of wire to prop him and just allowing it to fall, hoping we could capture it using the software, we had to think of other ways we could possibly do it. We decided to retry with the wires holding him up, but only using extremely small movements, we would then speed up the footage in editing. This seemed to work best, although it did not seem realistic in real time, editing would hopefully make it better. This trouble on the third scene made me realise how excruciatingly annoying it must be to produce feature length claymation productions such as the Wallace and Gromit movies and Chicken Run, in which they have much more impossible movements to pull off.