Tools
I used all the materials I can easily access at home. I created simple animations with Q-tips and paper. I ordered the iPhone tripod online, but unfortunately it hasn't arrived yet. So, I made an unstable tripod with water bottle. It wasn't good. The bottle fell in the middle of shooting, and the water was spilled out. I had to redo some paper prototype for GIF2, which is the reason the pac-man looks different at the end. There are a lot of materials accessible at home, like produce, wires and containers, so it wasn't hard to brainstorm when I already have things that I can make the gif with.
Process
My buddies are Laura and Akshita. We checked on each other twice this week through Zoom and discord chats. It was nice to have people to bounce ideas off. Laura started on her project first, then she shared the gif that she made with food. I thought that was so clever! That gave me some inspirations for my project. I played around with wires at first, and I even made a stick figure (see Figure 1). When I was shooting with the stick figure, I had to use my hands to support it. It was hard to erase my hands from the frames afterwards, and the discoloration was very noticeable. So, I decided to give up on that idea.
Figure 1
From that, I realized that it doesn't matter what materials I use as long as I made it fun with beginning and ending scenes. That's my opinion for now since I just started learning it haha. So, I decided to use paper and Q-tips. The lighting and shooting angel was hard to set up. It might be because I didn't have tripod and good lamp. I tried my best to shoot in an angel where my hands weren't shown. For GIF1, I actually filmed upside down. I realized it made more sense if I flipped it. I used an online tool to flip the GIF, so I didn't have to reshoot the whole thing. For GIF2, my water bottle tripod was in the frame, so I cropped it out with the online tool at the end. The cropped frame size is actually better than the horizontal one like GIF1. I tried to play around with the focus setting on Stop Motion Studio, but I couldn't get the result frame I wanted. So, this online editing tool really worked wonders.
GIF 1
GIF 2
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