For my Avatar project, I really wanted to do a concept in the category of mythology. Mythology was always an interesting topic to me, so in brainstorming ideas, I automatically remembered mermaids, which brought me to my childhood memories.
I remembered ever since I was a child, after watching the little mermaid, how obsessed I was with the whole fantasy. I wanted a tail and everything I did I had to associate it with the image of the mermaid. It lead to the point where my mother tried to stop me from thinking about mermaids, trying to interest me in girly objects such as makeup, until she gave me the truth at a very young age. I clearly remember the sadness that I felt, how my dreams were crushed and my imagination faded away.
For my project, I wanted to create a stop motion, particularly because they were always something I was curious on in terms of the process, and after watching many examples of stop motion animation, I decided to try it out.
The storyline is a young girl (who is me) imagining herself as a mermaid in her girly bedroom, but sadly everything she investigates that seems to be in her underwater fantasy world becomes a real life object.
After realizing the reality and that she would never be a mermaid, she melts into an object herself (a sticker).
For this whole project, it took me 9 hours to alone take the photos.
- I brainstormed underwater creatures and sea animals that could turn into the real life objects, such as a clam becoming a makeup mirror, and the school of fish becoming pieces of candy, etc.
2. I bought molding clay and modeled the mermaid and underwater objects, such as a clam, lobster, seaweed, coral etc.
2. I then bought a huge thick poster board, and covered it with pink and white foam, and stuck princess stickers all over the walls, recreating the “girly look” for the room, very pink and innocent.
3. I managed to find and already have the real life items I needed for the movie.
Honestly, it was very time consuming, moving the objects was difficult because sometimes I would forget whether I moved them or not, or figuring out how to make them move. I watched many tutorials on simple stop motions, and it still was a stressful process. A lot of the objects would fall apart, and I thought I would have done a really bad job, because I did not know how it was going to turn out once I combined all the images together to create the movie.
When I saw it put all together, with the effects and the sound, I really enjoyed it and was very proud of myself for a first time stop motion. I really didn’t think I could have accomplished a video like this, and truthfully I really did enjoy putting the video together, deciding which sound effect to add and the overall end result. This project really helped me find something I want to explore further and hopefully continue.
link for video:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1n89pn8lJUhrI92lvJNvInZm8txFlEQTL