We had started finishing up the main background setting and we had the idea of cutting all of the trees and foliage off the A3 paper and placing them onto another - this allows us to move characters such as the tiger and the girl behind trees as well as in front of them, we felt as if this would give our animation some depth. Having the option to be able to move characters in-between the trees would give us more options on how to animate the sequence; in the final animation we had the lion character exit the scene by moving behind the trees on the left side of the set. Doug worked on cutting these objects out using a Stanley knife other than scissors to get a more accurate cut; we didn't want to have unnecessary white paper hanging off any of the objects. Holly and Dan were making the tiger and the girl characters in the meantime; we needed two iterations of the girl because they were in different poses. In any stop-motion animation it is easier to have pre-existing templates or iterations of characters for different actions or poses than it is to modify an existing one. Modifying a cut-out is difficult because unlike other materials used for this type of animation (such as clay) card and paper are difficult to modify because they need to be cut which in turn is a destructive and linear way of editing something.
At this point I started making another set for the 'stomach' scene where the girl is eaten by the tiger, I wanted to have it similar to the film 'gulp' in which there's a red stomach surrounded by black. I wanted the stomach setting to be self explanatory like it was in Gulp but in this animation the girl would be smiling, look around and act surprised and the view would zoom out and it would be self-explanatory she was in the tiger's stomach. This gives the story some charm because it isn't force-feeding the viewer information, the viewer can fill in the gaps of what happened in their mind, especially when the narration says 'the girl was inside'; it would be pretty evident that the girl was eaten. The animators making the animation did not follow the storyboard as I had written it down; neither the smiling sequence before the 'realization' and the realization itself were not present at all in the final animation making this scene confusing. the 'realization' hinted to the viewer what had happened but now this was gone. In order to make sure we didn't confuse the audience we out-right had to make a scene of the tiger eating the girl which in my opinion really dumbed down the animation as a whole because we had to explain what was happening rather than letting the audience 'fill the gaps' with their imagination. There was no zoom outwards out of the tiger's stomach either which further simplifies the animation. However, we did manage to make the stomach scene more interesting by adding a 'flow' of stomach acid which washes away the girl; I feel as if how I envisioned these scenes playing out was more engaging and humorous.
We filmed the limerick animation in the same way we created previous animations: using iStopmotion to capture frames which would be exported into Final Cut. We added credits onto the end of the animation with cut-out letters; we had the credits slide and appear into view animating each letter individually by hand. We felt as though hand-made credits rather than computer generated ones really pushed the animation across as manually cut-out and alive rather than having a hybrid of the two. I brought the video into Final Cut and extended some of the credits (having the full name on-screen for longer) and ends of scenes (such as at the end of the stomach scene before cutting to the next scene) to make the animation easier to follow rather than giving the audience little time to process what happened. I also voice-recorded a narration to the limerick and placed that over the video; with the narration I also edited it to pause inbetween verses to ensure different verses started at the correct points in scenes.
This is the final animation; Overall I am dissatisfied. I think the cut-outs, sets are well done especially the jungle scene which features a lot of trees of foliage and the two characters have a charm to them. These cut-outs fit the limerick well and truthfully represent the limerick. I dislike the project itself however for a number of reasons. The animation is very jittery and jumpy which is very evident in the jungle scene. The tiger seems to float through the scene with no sense of weight or gravity which makes it unbelievable; the tiger seems to clip through several trees, this is down to someone trying to pass the tiger through the tree and placing it ontop before the entire body has moved through. The sequence were the girl is eaten is poor, I feel as it was tacked on. The lion itself isn't the original lion, it was a traced version from the internet; As I explained earlier the entire reason this sequence exists is because the storyboard was not followed but improvised along the way. If we had more time we could polish the animation by making it smoother with more focus; we had to use 6 frames per second as opposed to the usual 12 for stop-motion because of time-restraints, this very low rate makes the video longer as a whole as well.
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