Stop-Motion animation

In our last few lessons we have been exploring the concept of stop-motion animation. Stop-motion (also known as stop frame) is an animation technique used to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small fractions between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.
To begin with we watched some examples of famous stop motion films:

This animation is called 'Lunch' by Jan Švankmajer. Most of Švankmajer's work includes some elements of stop-motion. This animation has been created completely with stop-motion.

After looking at some examples of stop motion created by others, we were set the task to create our own short stop motion animation using resources in the media room. The main resource we used was play dough. We created both our setting and 'characters' in this medium. We decided to show some ducks swimming around in a pond, the pond is then engulfed by purple slime and the ducks disappear into the slime. We made this visual by taking photos of the ducks in different positions around the pond and then adding small parts of slime in each shot to show it moving across the pond. This is our finished product 'Ducks':

Using stop motion had positive and negative outcomes. Stop-motion is highly time consuming and intricate work as each shot needs to be altered only slightly to make it appear different to the last one, these alterations must be tiny and almost unnoticeable which means that a mere 6 second production took almost an hour to create and put together. However, the use of stop-motion is very effective as it can be used to display slow motion events. After experiencing the process of creating a stop-motion project I have decided that I will not be including it in my two minute opening sequence. This is because it would be too time consuming and put me at risk of not meeting the coursework deadline. Also, intricate planning and extensive storyboarding would be required in order to make the work look professional enough to submit. Due to this it is not appropriate for me to include stop-motion in my final 2 minute film opening.