The starring materials!

In shooting stop motion, materials should be manipulable to show movement across each frame. So, the first things that came to mind were clay and building blocks.

I'm aiming for versatile items to be used as the background. Most of the items I used was lying around in my home.

I got these cheap but cute and colourful building blocks from Mr DIY. I thought of using these because they are versatile. You can easily build surroundings by using the blocks, and also change the arrangements to however you want.

Like this, environments can easily be built up from scratch. The fancier ones are from a separate box from my personal collection.

This is the clay that I used for all the models. The red clay was fine, but the white clay gets dirty really easily. But other than that, the clay was really handy in shaping and making objects for the set.

With just bare clay, the models wouldn't be stable enough. It would flop over while I was still in the middle of shooting, which was a huge inconvenience. I would have to reshoot the whole scene. So, to stabilise it, I stuck a piece of thin wire in it to keep its shape. From this shot, you can also see that I used the back of 2 mounting boards as the walls for the set, and huge mahjong paper for the ground. I wanted it to be all white to fit my red-white-black theme.

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To make the black and red moving string things, I wrapped rope around a metal wire to make it solid but still malleable. Animating it was a huge pain because although it was malleable, it was also bouncy. It would make in ways that I did not want it to. Very hard to manipulate.

For the scene with the falling petals, the red stuff were bits tore out from this roll of special textured paper that was lying around at home. It comes in different colours too.

That's pretty much it for the special materials used. The rest that aren't mentioned are just household items lying around that I made use of.

#CTX