Production: Filming

I shot my stop motion animation on a Canon 60D Digital SLR, and used the program DragonFrame to collect my raw footage (I then used PremierePro for post production, see Editing & Sound).

The final shot of my film.

Whilst filming on my stop motion set, there were several things I decided to adapt from my initial idea in order to simplify my project: it was important to me that I created a high quality animation, so removing unnecessary elements from my ambitious plan would help achieve this.

Canon 60D set up to DragonFrame.

• The idea of The Wolf's form being primarily a silhouette proved to be difficult in the facilities I had available to me, as the lighting I used was not quite adaptable enough to project a distinguishable shadow onto my set. I therefore used the blurred shape of The Wolf's head for his first appearance, to keep the mysterious element involved. Separate figures were used on the set with Red for later scenes.

• In my pitch I mentioned a plan to alter the lighting intensity along with the tension of the piece, however because of the light sources I was using (a pocket torch on the lens of the camera and the natural lighting of the classroom) this became very hard to play around with. If I were to redo this project I would perhaps try making colour filters for my pocket torch to affect the light projected onto my set.

Checking Red's position between the set and DragonFrame.

• My storyboard shows everyday items scattered through the forest, and props such as a matchstick bed and a silhouetted fire for the Grandmother's house. Though I still like this idea and would've liked to incorporate it, I found it confusing during my production, and decided to instead focus on telling the story through movement and narration effectively rather than add poorly executed complications in. Likewise, my idea to 'move' real props on the stop motion set into the photographic frames became difficult and I again cut this out of the project so as not to be too ambitious with the connections between my set and the photographic frames

The low opacity of my current frame let me match positions.

• I decided to cut down the amount of shot types when I began filming in order to efficiently use the time I had available to complete the project in: because of the fiddly nature of stop motion animation, every time I changed the positioning of a shot I had to carefully rearrange both the camera set up and often the photographic frames and/or The Wolf. Shots were still changed as regularly as possible, however I did not achieve the shot-reverse-shot conversations I had proposed in my pitch and storyboard; this was also due to the fact I did not want to rely on the pacing of narration that I had not yet recorded.

The final pile of used photographic frames from my filming.

• My storyboard shows The Wolf's disguise as the Grandmother to be a little pyjama hat above his ears, however after receiving casual feedback from other students that it wasn't immediately clear what it meant, I decided to change the disguise to a shawl around the card figure. I feel this worked far better and also incorporated more things into the stop motion set as opposed to having all the action taking place in Red's photographic frames.