Task 2
Task 3
Task 4
Stop Motion Essay
The stop motion animation I will be looking at is "Lego Black Ops" by the YouTuber "Keshen8" who uses Lego for the animation as the title suggests. I will be looking at the techniques, style and success of the video on YouTube.
Keshen8, alias Keshen Sheken is the third most subscribed Lego animator on YouTube with his videos averaging over 1 million views and his most popular videos sitting pretty at around 5 million views. Lego Black Ops however has reached 21 million views. It is his most popular video. The success could be thanks to the relation to the source inspiration and how popular Call Of Duty is among young teenagers and young adults.
It is because of the video game's demographics that I believe that the people who are most likely going to watch this animation are the same people who play the game. Young and pre-teens from the age of 12 to adults in their early 20s. It is a Lego animation but due to its graphic nature it is most likely not recommended for young or impressionable viewers.
The animation is very well done so much so that there are moments when you'll forget you're watching a stop motion animation and not a CGI scene.
The animation is very well done so much so that there are moments when you'll forget you're watching a stop motion animation and not a CGI scene.
Call Of Duty is a first person shooter game, the animation has you follow a character from a third person perspective from a variety of angles to add a more cinematic and immersive effect for the audience. The camera mostly stays on the same character up until the moment of their death, from there it follows whoever got the kill on the previous character. This transition from character to character is very smooth and feels very natural.
The animation uses special effects which were added in post production possibly using photoshop tools to convert certain images to PNG format, like the grenade or the gun magazine in the pictures below.
The reason for creating PNG images is that it is impossible or at least very difficult to take a photo of an object in mid air when gravity is a factor, which it is. By using a PNG image in video editing software like you can add it as a layer on top of other images on the time line and move it in the frame and reduce or increase its size to give the illusion of a difference in space between frames.
Near - Far/ Far - Near. The bullet ricochets, blood splatters and fire bursts from guns were also done using this technique of overlaying the physical Lego sets with PNG's.
There are also a couple of shots done which appear to be the characters' first person views. These were done by layering the still image over the moving frames.
There are also various explosions, added in post production are in video format and were set on a second timeline layer. In Final Cut Pro you can remove parts of a frame to allow a second layer to appear in its place. That's how the explosion was added in post production.
The animation seems to be in 25 frames per second most of the time but there are shots which look like they have less. Other than a few moments where it seems there are less FPS there are no major frame jumps as far as I can tell. It is very fluid and well animated.
The characters move semi-realistically, the greatest effort has been made to make the characters move as quickly and smoothly as possible and there are times where it doesn't look like Lego because of how the shots are taken, the angles used and very slight adjustments to the characters limbs which make it look like the characters are bent at angles which Lego figures can't make without breaking them or melting them. If you look at the image below you can see that the character almost looks like he's covering his face slightly from a blast. Lego figures can only move their arms up and down. He was able to create this illusion by turn the character diagonally a few degrees and by rotating the hand slightly.
The backgrounds and environment are very basic. They mostly consist of grey or black walls/corridors with the occasional environmental object like a table or something for characters to hide behind. All of it is made with Lego so it maintains the feeling of watching an entirely Lego made production.
The animation technique is basic. It consists of moving the characters with very small adjustments from frame to frame and adding some pink clay/ play doh to look like a wound or a severed limb. The most complex part of the animation is the post production work. In post production Keshen added all the special effects and physical character interactions which weren't possible with the physical pieces like the gun shots, explosions and certain character movement which involved defying gravity.
The reason I think this may have been more difficult was because the entire production was done and then relied on the special effects done in post production for the entire animation to work and for it to be as fluid as it is. If anything was out of place or wasn't aligned with post production in mind Keshen would have to reshoot entire sets of frames.
There is a large variety of different shots, angles and movement in the animation. There are over the shoulder shots, close ups, mids, POV shots, long shots along with various others.
Angles play a big part in making some of the shots possible and making the characters look like they're in positions which aren't possible for lego figures.
The animation follows the characters as they move around in this environment. It follows different characters from different perspectives and angles. Over the shoulder, from the front looking at the characters, the sides. A lot of the camera movements look as though it's on rails, very smooth and stable from frame to frame.
There is no music in the animation. The sounds were all added in post production. There is no dialogue in this animation, only sound effects or guns, explosions, door, ricochets, etc. These sound effects were most likely taken from an online library and were used to dun over the animations. The sounds are all synched perfectly and each weapon each tool has a different sound which match said object, pistols sound like pistols, knives sound like knives.
In conclusion, Lego Black Ops is a very well done stop motion animation which mixes in elements of physical character manipulation with post production special effects both visual and sound effects. The video was successful because of how high the view count is in relation to when it was first released on YouTube.
The animator used very clever techniques to get the vision he wanted through to the audience. The most clever being the use of PNG images to create illusions of movement and spacial awareness which aren't possible using only the physical elements he had.
It uses various angles and different shots which added to the immersion and cinematic feel of the animation. Overall it's a very cool animation and as I've said it it extremely well done. This is a video which inspires me to make stop motion animations and to sit down and analyse what I'm watching while trying to understand how different aspects of stop motion animations are executed.
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