Jack
the monster started as a school project for an Animation course. We had
three months to work on the stop motion and we have been really happy
of people's interest and positive feedback on our project.
Our
first step was create a story suitable for our project, that would be
effective but not that long. We end up watching a lot of animations of
different genres to get inspiration.
After that, we shared ideas and mixed them together, creating a story based on what we both wanted.
The
story of our animation is about a girl who meets a weird and cute
creature. This creature seems to be special and different from others
because after eating something he starts to grow and grow. He eats
everything: bench, cars and more. The girl is surprised about his
“power” and she gets attached to him, knowing him better and spending
time together. But after a night, everything changes cause the creature
is a really big monster now and he knows he would be tempted to eat her.
The girl decide to looking for him around the city and she finally
finds him next to a river, where he seems to be sad. The girl
understands the monsters reasons of escaping, but she still wants to
stay with him and she decides to be eaten by the monster, to stay with
him forever.
The
storyboard was the next step. There we plan the techniques we are going
to use, the backgrounds we are going to create and what kind of
shooting we needed to do.
After getting the material from school, we started spending time cutting and animating at the same time.
The
cutting process was really hard but fun. We spent about 1 month
building paper trees, buildings, fountain, bridge, rivers, rooms, cars
and more. At the same time we drew the animation frame by frame on paper
with black markers and cut the figures out, leaving little bit of a
white edge to give our animation the style we wanted. Water was one
creative solution among others, it’s completely made of plastic wrap we
took from kitchen.
Not
everything was ready when we started to shoot because it was missing
buildings and sections of animation, but the time was running out so we
had to start to animating. The place where we animated was a darkroom in
the basement of our school, where an annoying ventilation was moving
our trees during the shooting. It wasn't the best place to shoot but we
were sure no one would have come there.
We
used a stop motion software called Dragon frame to help us to control
the shooting and to be sure we were moving the characters in the right
position. Dragon Frame was super helpful and I think the animation
wouldn´t be good without it.
We
were only in 2 to shoot the animation so we had to find the fastest way
to do it. When one of us was taking the picture and checking everything
was in the right position, other one was changing the hand drawn frames
and moving the props (like water for example). The work process took at
least 9 hours per day, shooting over 800 pictures.
The
music of our animation is by amazing Luci Holland. She was the winner
of a contest we had when we were looking for talented composers to write
music for our animation.
Working
for the project grew our interest in Animation and teached us a lot
about Dragon Frame and After Effects. Currently we are working on two
new projects; a music video with colorful special effects and a new stop
motion animation that will challenge us again, just like Jack the
monster did. We make a great and enthusiastic team so it’s always
thrilling and motivating to work together as we both look for new
chances to learn and get experience.
Text & Images: Sindy Giraldo & Iina Kuula 2014
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