Sound Effects

An obvious element to the video I somehow overlooked was sound. I've noticed that in all of the stop motion videos I've watched, unless tester videos, have has sound of some sort in them.

Due to the fact I'm not allowed to use copyright material I found a website from which contains a massive database full of sound effects that can be used royalty free in personal productions

http://stonewashed.net/sfx.html

I have already found several effects I wish to use such as rain, explosions, lit fuse, sewing machine, cutting paper with scissors and coins falling. I also found another website which again has within a enormous database full of copyright free music, I have yet to explore the different music availible but will be doing so shortly http://freeplaymusic.com/

Update

I have been deep in production over the last few days so here's an update to the assignment:

I was able to hire out a Nikon D40 DSLR camera from the photography department which was useful as I was able to take better quality images with it. The preparation for the shooting has taken ages.

I started by choosing the font I wanted, even after looking at lots of different fonts on the web, I decided upon a preset 'Word Art' one which was large, bold and plain on the inside, this was perfect as I would be able to fill it in with colouring pencils when printed out. This is shown below:

Unstoppable

Before I printed it, I had an idea to do the entire thing on the computer using screen shots, I did a little test of this, the video of which is below:

I deemed that it would not be suitable as I would not be able to certain scenes such as the cutting by the scissors; so instead I proceeded to print of the frames I needed. I printed of 15 copies of the same page and 5 of the word on the page twice for me to cut out and use.

As soon as I started to take pictures I changed the storyboard slightly, I decided to get more movement shots in so I made it seem as if the letters that make up the word were travelling to the page the effect of which I found very effective.

The total time it took me to take all the necessary pictures was around 19 hours over a stretch of three days, the initially predicted 150 images and 1 minute 15 seconds seemed in hindsight a stupid prediction as the final number of pictures hit nearly 800 with the time not hitting 3 minutes 1 second. Throughout the production I again made several changes and modifications to the original storyboard all of which I feel were appropriate and made the overall effect better.

Here is the first draft of the video.

Here's a short bit of footage I shot while I was in the middle of creating it all:

Research on Animatic's

When doing research on pre production I discovered a popular technique used called an 'Animatic' I looked into them further on this site http://www.aboutanimatics.com/ and others and found that they can prove to be very helpful in seeing the way in which a video will flow, or as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyboard#Animatics says "Better idea of how the scene will look and feel with motion and timing"

I found several exampled on YouTube from which I got a more visual underatanding of what an animatic was.

With this knowledge I proceded to create my own animatic using the storyboard I created:

Doing this has given me a better idea of how the video will run and I'm happy with it, so I will soon be proceeding with production.