The Making Of The Hungry Caterpillar

So after much delegation within my group we have decide to create our animation around the story of the hungry caterpillar, a book written by Eric Carle. The story follows a hungry caterpillar who spends a week eating as many things as he can. It's a light hearted story perfect for children. I thought it would be a nice touch to make Eric Carle aware of what we were doing so I left him a message on his personal website. 

  

We are going to go with a Wallace and Gromit approach and make all of our characters and props out of clay and then slowly change them to create the impression of movement. 

Here are some of our characters, and the food the caterpillar was going to indulge in. Here is a picture of a full sept up ready for filming.

As you can see we have used Zu3d a program designed for making animations in primary school. We have used the ipad version, and through this we will do all our filming and editing and then will upload it to youtube. Once we have finished filming, I will then edit in the sound again using the software provided in Zu3d. 

The record feature on the program was especially helpful as this allowed us to do everything through the ipad its self and didn't have to keep chopping and changing between ipad and computer. As well as this Zu3d has a large array of sound effect features. 

Over all Zu3d was a really useful package and really helped us when completing our final animation. 

Stop Motion an introduction

So here's a brief history on stop motion filming. It is first credited to be invented by Albert E Smith and J Staurt Blackton for the film The Humpty Dumpty Circus. Blackton also went on to do The Haunted Hotel in 1907. It then went from strength to strength and has been used in a great many motion pictures including the AT AT walker scene in Star Wars shown below. 

The biggest household name when it comes to stop motion is defiantly Wallace and Gromit. When it comes to clay animation Nick Park is definitely the leading expert. Wallace and Gromit produces Aardman are a truly British company and are still based in the UK. 


Aardman studios





So how is it all filmed? After detailed storyboarding, set and plasticine model construction, the movies are shot one frame at a time, moving the models of the characters slightly to give the impression of movement in the final film. It's a pain staking process and takes huge amounts of time.