stop motion animation

My Stop Motion Animation 

My stop motion animation is a recreation of the arcade game Pac-man. I came up with this idea when another media pupil told me they were basing their animation around the game Tetris. This got me thinking about other old, arcade games. I was stuck between a choice of Pac-man or Space Invaders, I decided Pac-man would be easier to accomplish. I decided to use clay-mation after watching different animations from previous students. I thought it would look better than using paper or card to make by characters. After I came up with my idea I searched youtube for stop-motion animations linked with Pac-man. The videos inspired me and gave me a number of ideas on how I could create my own animation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCGcKuiro_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOblBDNQrcAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScvyhoYCX5A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT2y5gAMuWs

Frame Rate

As my animation is stop-motion, 1 frame would equal to one photograph. My animation doesn't require a high fps (frames per second) rate as the game itself doesn't have a high fps because its an old arcade game. I intend to make my animation around 5-10 frames per second as I need to make the Pac-man's mouth open and close in one smooth motion. This will mean I will need to make a variety of Pac-man clay models with the mouth open at different widths instead of remodelling the same model every frame. This will also save me a lot of time. Having a frame rate of 5-10 will also allow my other characters to move around the maze smoothly. I will be trying to avoid my animation looking jumpy.

Problems and Limitations

There are a few problems I may run into when creating my stop-motion animation. One problem may be the making of the characters. I will be making my characters out of clay (Play-Doh) and as I need to make a variety of pac-man characters for reasons I have already explained they need to be the same size to ensure my animation looks professional. Also, the pac-man will be eating the pac-dots throughout the animation and I need a way of making it look like the pac-man is actually eating them instead of him getting close to them and them just disappearing. I may encounter a few problems filming my animation. I need to make my animation look smooth by using an appropriate frame rate. This will mean I will need to move characters a minuscule amount and keep track of where the characters will be moving as they will be moving in different directions.  This may get confusing after awhile. I am hoping to make my animation at least 5 frames per second and as my animation has to be at least 1 minute long this will mean it will in total consist of 300 frames. This will mean I will need to take 300 pictures which will be very time consuming. I may have trouble editing as well, I will need to edit my frames together to make it one movie clip and then add in sound effects and music. I don't have much experience in editing software therefore it may be a challenge for me to complete it by the deadline.