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READING & WRITING: 

Chapter Seven – Design Wonderland

Something amazing about Animation is the ability to create completely new worlds. You can create entirely crazy worlds where anything can happen. Though this does not mean that you do not need rules. An audience will go along for whatever haywire journey you set up, if you take it seriously. Things to keep in mind as you design a world are:

• The time and place the story takes place, this decides what the environment is like. In my stop motion A Pony Fright, it is supposed to be like kids playing with the ponies, so the world is made up of a table, household curtain, a paper napkin and a My Little Pony Castle.
• What physical laws apply to the world, this helps to make the environment you present seem believable. A Pony Fright takes place on a table and so the pony world exists entirely on the table. Off the table is a no-pony’s land where no pony dares to trot.
• What social laws that govern your world, this helps in world building by creating a more in-depth world. When deciding on social laws, you can look to history, established lore, and even nature for inspiration.  Established My Little Pony lore says that friendship is magic, so in A Pony Fright when the prankster pony is unmasked things are talked about, forgiven, and then danced out.
• Keeping visuals shown consistent throughout the animation will strengthen your story. In creating A Pony Fright, I had to do two days of shooting because I did not realize inconsistencies in shots from the first day of shooting until I was editing them together the next day. At one point I knocked my camera off kilter, so half the animation was suddenly taking place on a hill. This was a distracting inconsistency, so I reshot all the photos and paid closer attention to consistency throughout the shots. This made a more effective stop motion.

Chapter Eight – Technique

While it can be tempting to continually use the animation technique you are most comfortable with, it is not always the best technique to tell a story. When deciding on what technique you will use, consider how it will impact your story. You can experiment with different techniques and visual styles to see how each changes the tone and which best fits.

In A Pony Fright, while the same story could certainly be told using 2D animation or even 3D animation, the humor of A Pony Fright would not be the same. The limitations of movements that the stationary My Little Pony toys have provided a kitschy feeling to the overall movement of the whole animation. I do not think it would be as successful as a story using another animation technique.

Blazer, L. (2016). Chapter 7: Design Wonderland. In Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics (pp. 101–110). essay, Peachpit Press.

Blazer, L. (2016). Chapter 8: Technique. In Animated Storytelling: Simple Steps for Creating Animation and Motion Graphics (pp. 113–126). essay, Peachpit Press.

RESEARCH TO INFORM:

This video effectively uses sound to redo this scene from Jurassic Park. Music is not present, but the original ambient sound and sound effects with new sound effects to make it believable that a giant cat is in the scene. Not to mention that the editing with the fancy feast cans is awesome too.

This video informs about the life of a phrog. It is not only very educational, but effectively uses music, sound effects, and ambient sound to give the video a charming personal feeling to it. Also, the animation is very cute, I love the little phrog butts. This video also uses a bit of text, but it is not as big of an element as the audio.

This video is a stop motion about a creature racing against a clock to make its greatest creation. It effectively uses ambient sound, music, and sound effects to tell the story and gives a feeling of urgency as time is counting down. Plus, I just find the creature in it weirdly cute, I want to put him in my pocket and carry him around.

This video shows the history of Cartoon Network’s Logo animations from the 1990s to 2022. Over the years Cartoon Network has had a lot of different animations, but I find them all intriguing and effective. I also like that their logos adapt with the time, like with them switching to more 3D animations as it became more popular around 2010.

This video is a kinetic typography that talks about the history of typography. Not only is it interesting information about typography, but it is a good example of using animated text as well as using sound effects, ambient sound, and music to make a video more engaging.

CREATE:

I feel like the production of A Pony Fright went a lot smoother than the production of my stop motion animation test, despite it being much more ambitious project to create. While I did have to go back and reshoot my photos, the composition of my files went way easier. For the stop motion test, I had to turn all my photos from HEIC files to JPGs and then on top of that I had to rename each individually.

For A Pony Fright I was able to change my phone settings so it took photos as JPGs to save myself the conversion step. Each file still needed to be renamed to be used in a sequence in Premiere Pro. I was able to select multiple files to rename them at once, but each file was numbered after within parentheses.

Each file was named something like “frame (1),” which seems like it wouldn’t be a problem. However, parentheses is something that Premiere Pro can’t comprehend and so it couldn’t recognize the photos as being part of a sequence. This caused me to have to remove the parenthesis from each file name, which took a while but, I still feel like it was easier than renaming every file individually. It saved me from accidental numbering errors from numbering them myself.

During pre-production I made the stage directions on the storyboards vague so I could make the decision that felt right when I went to shoot my photos. Originally the castle was just a background element in the center of the screen. When I went to set up the scene, I felt like making the castle on the far right side of the table was the better option. I also decided to use the castle as a hiding place for the ghost pony and the steps up to the castle as a scare stage for the ghost pony.

Originally, I had been planning to use club music for dance music, but then I had the idea of sampling Pink Pony Club by Chappell Roan. Since I am not making money from this, and I made sure to give proper credit to her and all the other resources I used in making this, I think it is okay. (Also, how can you sue me for making ponies dance to your music? That’d be rude).

One last element that changed since pre-production is the importance of sound. In the storyboards, the sounds started as after thoughts as to what sounds may fit. The ponies were always going to run away screaming, but the exact way they go running wasn’t developed until after I got the frames and then found the perfect scream for each pony.

By choosing to be vague in my stage directions of my storyboards, I was able to adapt my animation to fit the storytelling as it developed.  I was then able to effectively use all the elements of stop-motion animation.