Evaluation of the Tetris stop motion animation project.

1. Stop Motion Summer project Tetris stop motion evaluation

2. Inspiration Tetris Game I drew inspiration from the game Tetris, with an already stop motion style game play it seemed suitable for a stop motion film.

3. Drafting We started with the idea of doing a full computerised style Tetris game, complete with cursor and a game over sign. We decided this was too complex to follow through on. We also changed the style of the board, it was originally going to be lay horizontally on a surface and the pictures would be taken from above, but the lighting was poor if shot from above. So after the first shot we mounted the board on a wall and shot the project vertically. The board, shot from above, noticeably darker ... And the board mounted on a wall, with brighter results.

4. Equipment We used A camera, A tripod, A laptop and a USB cable to eventually upload the Pictures up on to a slideshow. We also used A memory card and a memory stick to upload the pictures, as there were over 400 of them we had to leave some out and cut down the photo’s to a reasonable amount.

5. Limitations As the game of Tetris took so long to play in real time, making a shot for shot remake of one took even longer. We ended up shooting for at least 3 hours, so the time limitations did affect our final product. There were no other limitations, we had plenty of paper to make the pieces and more than enough blutac and memory on the camera. If anything, the biggest limitation was the amount of photos we took, after 400 photos we realised we had too many to upload so we had to cut over 100 photos from the final product, meaning at parts it is more jumpy due to missing pictures.

6. How did this task enable you to be creative? As part of a pair doing this task it allowed us to both be creative with what we knew of stop motion animation technique, it allowed us to progress our ideas of what would make a good stop motion and incorporated an interest in retro games. The task allowed us to not only use artistic creativity to prepare the pieces for the animation but also be creative in the sense of when we ran into a problem, we could work around it with the resources we had.