Experiment: Stop Motion vs After Effects

After realising how tough the risk of doing the live action/ stop motion route is going to be, I have settled on two experiments I have made. They both involve paper cut assets, and feature recorded test dialogue. The first is animated with stop motion in Dragonframe, and the second is animated with after effects. I am assuming the after effects will be smoother, but which of the two captures the creepiness of that wooden lion that terrorised me at an early age.

Lets find out...

Filmed on my rostrum camera stand and animated with Dragonframe This is the first test. I had a bit of difficulty with the colour key, and the eyes had to be animated digitally. The dialogue is "I am Mr Wolf, with eyes better to see you with." The voice has been digitally altered as well to have a similar echoing reverb that the lion and the bear had, as well as a more growly voice. The issue regarding the colour key is that I practically have all colours difficult to key on the wolfs design., blue and green are too close and if I did red the pink would go away. So I chose white but the teeth where keyed out and he became less threatening. There was also the issue of syncing jaw movements with the audio. I couldn't exactly predict the jaw movements needed so I sped up certain duplicates of the pre-animated footage and...it's meh. Now onto the digital experiment...

I decided to do this digitally animated one in addition to the scene I was working on where he first appears. And while it does seem biased, I do think this wolf is less time consuming too animate as well as static enough to really emulate the creepy vibe. His echoing voice against the silent backdrop really shifts the tone of the scene. In fact it kind of spooks me more when he starts talking. It's like a clown offering sweets to children. So yes, I think I definitely prefer this one. So, ironically. It's a combination of hand made assets animated digitally that creates the more creepy animation. This makes sense now that I think about it.