Evidence of Production; Characters and Set

For my stop motion piece I decided to use wooden drawing mannequins, because I thought they would be an easier form of model to use, because they are designed to be physically moved in stages. People use drawing mannequins as references when drawing the human body. I originally decided to try and use three mannequins as my different characters, as I had originally planned on having a different story-line as the main focus of my animation. 

My first idea was to have a genre of drama in my animation, with three mannequins being involved in a conflict with each other. I was content with my original plan until 2 weeks before filming and decided to change my idea, because I realised how difficult mannequins are to move/position and don't really maintain their positioning very well. It seemed impractical to solely use mannequins in my piece because the frames wouldn't have moved consistently. I decided instead to make an animation based on mannequins drawing, instead of being drawn. I thought this would be easier because the viewer could get the idea that the mannequins are drawing, even if the actual mannequins aren't being shown very often. 

I originally planed on using these three mannequins, for my two male characters, and my female character, but decided against it when I realised how difficult it was to manipulate the joints (shown below) of the mannequins. Shooting in twos would have been difficult to do because the 'joints' of them kept pinning back into their original position., which would have altered the consistency of the animation. 

These were the three mannequins against the backdrop that I was considering on using. I later decided to use a lighter background as the setting of the piece, and used my bedroom wall to position the drawing on and then my desk with the wall behind it, to set my mannequins up again.


I decided to have them against a black backdrop for some parts of the animation so as to concentrate focus on just the mannequins at certain points of the animation, when climax is built during certain points.