In the turbulent weeks of the Presidential Election, there is nothing better I can do than stay occupied and I took this time to experiment with some personal work. Also, commercial work has been slow, so it’s always a good time to use this time to polish skills. It’s been a while since I wanted to do a stop-motion animation using paper and clay as part of the animation elements, and since there is a family trip next month (Dec. 2024), I wanted to use this as the central subject.
One of the reasons I like to do stop-motion animation is that I’m terrible at drawing, and it is easier for me to use actual objects or pre-made drawings to incorporate into my stop-motion animations. This time, I found some great illustrations by talented designer Yuliya P. from Briefstock that matched the background I wanted to combine into the final stop-motion animation. I was looking for a desert background and vegetation.
I extracted various elements from Yuliya P.’s illustrations that I wanted to use on my background and placed them on a tabloid page for print. I added a large white stroke around each illustration to give a sticker look and to make it more practical to cut out. After cutting each illustration, I start thinking about how to make the cutout paper stand so it can be animated.
My first thought was to use a piece of wood as a stand since I had previously used this technique in other projects; this was my first try, but it did not work because it was too tedious to custom-cut each piece of wood to match the shape of the illustrations. After some material exploration, I used craft foam, which worked well. It was easy to cut and adapt to the paper-printed illustration but very messy!
After preparing all the elements for my animation, I started sketching some ideas on how it would be animated. The idea was to have an animated background and central element to add a depth-of-field effect, but since there were too many elements, I needed to plan accordingly. I separated it into three parts: first, I animated the background landscape, then the car. These two animations were merged in post-production using After Effects.
Finally, I animated my hands, simulating sculpting a car using clay, and compiled everything into one final animation. As usual, the most complicated part was timing and speed. I still need to polish that area to make movements more smoothly.
Check out the Desert Roat Trip final video below, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
