My final project is a stop motion animation of celebrities dressed as classical story book characters attending a celebrity event I named Nadine’s Choice Awards After party. The concept behind this animation is our interest in the lives of celebrities behind movies or songs rather than the actual movie character or song content. Camera flash sounds are playing in the background, making it clear that these celebrities are being photographed. These photographs are meant to feed our celebrity hungry minds.
created all my characters and the setting background on illustrator, printed them out, and then finally cut them up.
Setting up my stop motion animation was a bit of a hassle, but I found a way! I set up my towel rack and put a flat surface on top of one of the racks, and then I tapped my phone to the top rack. This would prevent my camera from moving, and stabilize my stop motion.
In order to create my stop motion I moved each character bit by by bit and got everything on camera. It was very important to do this stop motion during the day time as it was the best way to avoid shadows being cast onto my images. In order to collect camera flash sound I recorded myself taking photographs.
I put this whole thing together using Premiere. I had a bit of trouble at first as my photos would not show up in the correct order, but in the end I was able to do it by dragging small groups of photos bit by bit. This took some time as I had something between 600 to 700 photos. After adding the photos I added my sound recordings. At times I put more than one voice recording of camera flashes above each other as to create an effect of increased camera flashes.
Proposal:
Celebrities have become the new storybook characters. Today, we are more often interested with the celebrity behind the movie or the celebrity behind the song than we are with the actual movie or song. Once upon a time storybook characters were the characters we were invested in, not the celebrity behind the character; we were interested in the actual character in the actual movie, not who was playing the character. The important stories were the movie and book plots, not the plots about the lives of celebrities.
In order to show this phenomenon, I’m planning on creating a stop-animation. The characters in this animation are celebrities, but they’re not just ordinary celebrities; they are celebrities dressed as storybook characters. Think of Taylor Swift as Cinderella, Emma Stone as Cinderella’s fairy God mother, Miley Cyrus as Alice in Wonderland, Justin Bieber as Peter Pan, Kim Kardashian as the Evil Queen, and so on. Now imagine all of these celebrities attending a Red Carpet Event, and lets call this event Nadine Choice Awards Afterparty, which will be made clear in my secondness image as I will be showing a wide angle shot that will shed light on what is happening to the viewer. These celebrities are moving across the red carpet on the screen one after the other, creating several action shots as a thirdness image. Paparazzi cameras flash all over the screen, so us, the hungry story-craving people get the celebrity updates we are waiting for. As each camera flashes we hear camera flash noises, which can be interpreted as a Causal mode of listening as we can connect it to the source.
This stop-animation is going to be made using illustrated characters, which I will manually move across a “red carpet.” I’ll be taking photos of each movement and combining them to create a moving image. The whole thing should add up to a minute or two of video footage. These moving characters will be digitally drawn, using illustrator, but their faces will be images of the celebrity they represent as to show the contrast between real and imagined characters, going along as symbols of my story and displaying semiotics.
This is one of the hottest celebrity events of the year. Every celebrity attending is in the public eye. We crave juicy details about these people’s lives. The movies and songs they’re promoting is the last thing we think of. We want the real stories about these people’s lives.
