Animation: Romeo and Juliet

These pictures are from my first video production project at university. We were asked to produce a short video about any topic/theme we wanted. I think it was also designed by the lectures as a bonding experience as it was our first chance to meet all our fellow Film, media and entertainment technology students.

The unit really helped us to develop our camera, editing and production planning skills. The whole project had a much more professional and sophisticated feel to other video production work I had done before. We were required to complete pre-production paperwork such as a full script, storyboards, camera logs, location checklists, release forms etc.

We used a Sony DCR-TRV 950E camera to film and the whole video took about two days in total to film as finding stairs in our university building that people weren't constantly walking up and down was a difficult task. We has a few actors (AKA: people passing by our shoot) to talk a little at the beginning of the video but the video mainly concentrated on the love story of blu-tac/play-dough characters Romeo and Juliet. (As show in the pictures below)

I volunteered to make the little blu-tac / Play-dough people although I did regret it afterwards. They were not as easy as they look to make. The light blue figure stuck together well but the play-dough characters constantly fell apart. We even attempted dying some blu-tac so that we could get pink blu-tac but the colour didn't come out very well. It all worked out in the end and we used the blu-tac figure to play Romeo and the pink play-dough figure to play Juliet.

We got a first for the whole project. We were really pleased as doing stop motion animation was a big risk, especially as none of us had ever done any animation work prior to this project but luckily it turned out great and we definitely had the most unique and original idea in my opinion. Unfortunately I have lost the disk with the final outcome on which is really annoying as I really enjoyed the process of making the short video and would have liked to keep a copy.