Documenting The Doing #3: Problematise & Solutionate

Finding a problem can be easy, but finding a solution can be much more difficult. Our motto for the next few years is if we find a problem, we have to try our hardest to find a solution. This way, we should all hopefully sail through the next two years, with obviously a few speed bumps on the way.

Our next task was to create a short stop-motion animation that resolves creative problems. We were put in designated groups again, and in a group of three, we decided to come up with two short, snappy words; 'SOCIAL' and 'BRAVE'. It's safe to say that a big handful of the people in our group were nervous about meeting new people, and some were excited. Personally, I couldn't think of anything more nerve-wracking that talking to people I've never even seen before. I didn't have any confidence in myself at all.
These two words really stood out for the us as we all felt the same towards them.

We were given an A4 sheet of paper with 2 people sitting at chairs, with speech bubbles appearing out of their mouths as if they were talking at one another. Creating the animation meant we had to use short but bold markings on the paper, eventually spelling out the two words within the speech bubbles. We decided to use marker pens as this would really come to life on the paper when we came round to editing it. The aim of this project was to make the movie as smooth as possible as this would create the best effect. We shortly drew parts of the letters, eventually making up the entire word, and every time we drew a section, we would take a picture. Once we'd completed the wording, we then went on to do funky designs around the page to make it appear more fun - which is in theory what college is all about, having fun.

Editing the movie wasn't the hardest task in the world, as it only required importing the images we'd taken into Adobe Premier Pro, and choosing what speed we wanted them. We thought about adding a title to the movie to explain why we had chosen these two particular words, but it turns out that the movie would eventually be developed in to a group project, bringing in everyone else's movies, so we decided to keep it short and sweet.

I really enjoyed completing this project as it gave us a visual reality of how stop-motion animations are produced and edited, and hopefully I will expand my knowledge of this in the future and create an animation that will be known worldwide! Optimistic, I know!

Cheerio. :o)

- Olivia.