Research & Planning: Designing an ESting

Research & Planning: Designing & ESting

To create my ESting I plan on using stop motion animation. Stop motion animation is animation that is captured one frame at a time with physical inanimate objects that are moved between frames. When you play back the sequence of images rapidly, it creates the illusion of movement. I plan to use a combination of A3 paper backgrounds, clay characters, and Lego characters.

In my proposed ESting I want to create a whole battle scene rather than just focus on one character. The idea would be that clay figures are holding a Lego castle and are defending the walls from loads of Lego figures. They battle for a bit then a drawbridge comes crashing down, crushing Lego figures with an E4 logo made out of clay in the middle of it.

The inspiration is a Lord of the Rings type battle, obviously on not so much of a grand scale though. I would use the corner of a room and print out large A3 sheets of backgrounds/horizons to create more of an illusion. My animation will be set on medieval type battle ground out side a castle made of Lego. The camera wont move much and will stay in a fixed position so we wont see inside the castle but I still plan on making it 3D rather than just a row of walls.

I don't think there will be too many limitations with this idea. All of the resources are available to me in college. The only thing will be creating a good set will be very time consuming if I want to do it on a large scale like I plan to. I will have to build a castle out of Lego and get it looking realistic, and then I will have to design a literal army of clay characters. Lego characters I can just buy 20 of them or something but I'll have to design each clay character one by one. I don't plan to have any dialogue for this reason and would rather just focus on the whole battle, leading up to the moment the draw bridge comes crashing down with the E4 lego on it. My primary target audience I think would be young males between the ages of 16-24, also E4's primary target audience.