Statement of Intent
Concept Statement:
This stop-motion animation visually illustrates a prince and princess’s waltz. The music starts slow as the two lovers descend the stairs, making their grand entrance. They join together at the foot of the stairs. As the music begins to pick up, the two lovers dance in a warm, close embrace across the large ballroom floor.
Paper folding techniques are implemented to create the structure of the staircase. The Cricut machine cuts the cardstock of the final images of the prince and the princess. Movement and space are the main principles activated in this composition. We used a waltzing song, Johann Strauss II – Blue Danube Waltz (Andre Rieu’s version), as the background music. This was a group project and Shana was my Partner. I worked on the video editing portion and Shana worked on the stop-motion animation. We both made the characters that were seen in the video.
Ideation:
Exercise #1: Audio-Visual Score
For our first exercise we “visualized a score” that represents 10-15 seconds of a piece of music. We were able to manipulate shapes including squares. circles, and triangles. We must use principles such as scale, repetition, and positioning will influence our visual score. We could use a range of Hues, Color Values, and varying Opacities.
The song I picked for this exercise was West Coast by Lana Del Rey: the first 17 seconds of the song. I picked this song because the introduction has multiple components like drums and guitars that sounded like an interesting piece to put together visually.
West Coast by Lana Del Rey [0:00-0:17 secs]
First I made a 17” x 11” Illustrator document in landscape orientation. I put a horizontal line across the middle of the page. This horizontal line is used as a reference e when considering the dynamic placement of shapes.
Horizontal Line
First I did the drums for the song. I decided to make the drums a mix of ovals/ circles. The drums are a consistent component of the song, so I placed them in the middle of the page, overlapping the line. The circles/ ovals are a mix of black and yellow. The lower bass drum is placed lower on the line and the higher/cymbal-like sounds are placed higher above the line.
Drum Line
In the song, there is this background noise/ sound effect that is played. There is a set of two and it repeats multiple times in each set. It sounds like it’s growing ascending upwards. To represent this, I took a triangle and manipulated/ stretched the points. I used repetition and made them ascend the page. They start small and then slowly increase in size as you move across the page. I made them different shades of blue starting with light and going to dark blue.
Background Sound Effects
Then I made the guitar sounds out of a peach horizontal squiggly line. The higher notes are placed higher, the lower notes are placed lower on the page. Every time the guitar slides down the fret (neck) I made a vertical squiggly line to connect the top note as it slides to the bottom note. These are bar chords, so I made the squiggles placed over one another like a 2 step staircase for each chord.
Lastly, I put these waves at the start of the line to represent the static that can be heard in the beginning of the song.
Final Outcome
Exercise #2:
For the next exercise practiced cutting and folding templates for paper mechanisms. I chose to do the Flexagon Repeating 4-frame Rectangular Animation Contraption.
Flexagon Repeating 4-frame Rectangular Animation Contraption
Exercise #3:
Using paper mechanisms we made a pop up card that revealed a hidden layer. First I folded a piece of paper in half so it looks like a card. Then in the front cover of the card I made a small horizontal cut in the middle of the page. On one bottom of the slit I drew one half of a flower. I took a separate piece of paper and drew the other half of the flower. Below the half flower I then drew a small bee. I cut this out and stuck the bee into the slit in the front cover. The final result was a flower that the top half is able to be lifted to reveal a Bee “hiding” inside of the flower.
Then we began to brainstorm potential songs we might use for the video:
- Tyrants Catfish and the Bottleman
- Do I Wanna Know Arctic Monkeys
- West Coast Lana Del Rel
- Take Me Out Franz Ferdinand
- Softcore the neighborhood
- She Harry Styles
- Cry Baby The neighborhood
- The Perfect Girl Maurex
- New person same old mistakes
- Hey You Pink Floyd
- Music to watch boys to Lana Del Rey
- I Know The End, Phoebe Bridgers
- Glue Song beabadoobee
- Die For You Joji
- Good News Mac Miller
- Gilded Lily Cults
- For Lovers Lamp
- Once Upon A Dream Sleeping Beauty (Instrumental Version)
- Johann Strauss II Blue Danube Waltz (Andre Rieu’s Version)
Then we search for interesting mechanisms/ designs we could use for our video.
Origami Dome
Origami Dome
Paper Folding Stairs
3D Staircase
3D Waves
Yoshimura Polyhedral Pattern
We decided to do a stop motion animation of a waltzing/ dancing scene. First we brainstormed what we wanted the setting to be. We wanted to do a large ballroom with a grand staircase in the background. We decided to use the 3D mountain wall video tutorial to make the staircase. We downloaded and printed out the template.
Stairs Template
Cutting out the Template
Final Staircase
We went on Pinterest to find some inspiration and pictures we could use as a reference make the characters.
Waltzing Picture #1 Waltzing Picture #2 Aurora Cinderella and Prince
I took all these images and put them into illustrator and made the waltzing characters.
Putting Pictures into Illustrator
Making the Characters
Adjusting so that all the Characters are the Same Style
I made one version with just the outline of the character and the other with the details. This way we can print out the outline in Bristol as the base. Then print the individual details on different colored cardstock.
Details in the Suit and Dress
All the Pieces Together
Then we started to cut all the pieces out using the Cricut.
Detailed Cuts
Base Cuts for the Characters
At first we wanted to take the detail pieces and trace them onto the colored cardstock. Then we realized that that the pieces were too small and hard to cut by hand so we decided to use the Cricut to cut the detail pieces as well. After cutting out the pieces we layered them on top of the base pieces.
After we finished both sections, I combined the 2 videos and placed the song in the background.
Reflection
Through this project I learned how to do stop motion animation using both physical movements and editing tools. We used a combination of apps to achieve the final video. I learned a lot about good craft, especially when making the staircase. It was challenging to get all the folds to stand up and we found out that if we scored the paper too deep then each stair would break off, so we were very careful when making our final staircase. This was our first group project, so I learned a lot about working together as a team. The best part of the collaboration was brainstorming and coming up with creative concepts. I liked how we got to bounce ideas off of each other.
Final Product
