"Wishful Dreaming"
A stop-motion animation I did for my Illustration Concepts II class.
Story, character development, and animation by Bagel Han
Music: "I Will" by The Beatles (copyright by Apple Corps)

I spent a day or two a week for 6 weeks on it and it still needs a bit of tweaking here and there, but for the most part it is finished.

The Process:
I originally wanted to create more dolls much like the ones I made last year. I storyboarded a couple of story ideas until I started to realize that going three dimensional was going to be way too challenging. I decided to make it two dimensional and more simple instead. I also ended up using a completely new character who was born in one of Rebecca Bradley's sketchbook assignments.
I was still planning on using the Cornelius song, but about a quarter way through the animating, I decided it needed a more mellow song than that. I also wanted something that would touch the hearts of a lot of people. I started to go through all of the music I had, from shortest to longest, until I came upon a few songs. After much though, I decided to go with The Beatle's "I Will" (copyright by Apple Corp). It turned out to be the best fit for the story and the same length as the length of the animation itself.

The Materials:
Construction paper, watercolor paper, drawings (and enlarged copies) of the characters and the bike, handwritten text, india ink, a tripod, my digital camera, and my powerbook G4.

Survival Kit:
Diet colas: A major necessity. The Diet Pepsi was a substitute for when my school's vending machines didn't have Diet Coke and simply refused to give me one.
Background Noise: I'm a huge, huge fan of Roseanne. Roseanne was the only show/movie I could watch over and over and over and not get distracted or annoyed. Seasons 1-4 on DVD kept me going during the animation process.
The Art of Animation Itself: Quite simply, once I started animating, it was hard to stop. That really helped me to keep going.

The Stories:
The first idea: We zoom in on the main character who is sleeping. He begins to dream. A stranger sneaks in then snatches his dreams then runs away. The main character, rudely awakened, chases after the thief for the rest majority of the movie. During the chase, the thief drops pieces of the dream that the main character picks up and stuffs into his hat. The movie ends with the main char. having collected all of his dreams and gone back to sleep. The song I was going to use for this: "The Micro Disneycal World Tour" by Cornelius
The second idea: Same as the first idea except for these few changes: The main character dreams, steps into his dreams and goes on a crazy, crazy, crazy adventure.
The final idea: "WISHFUL DREAMING"

Information:
SIZE: 4MB
W: 640px x H:480px
If you're the impatient type and would rather download it then watch it later, do so here...DOWNLOAD

NOTE: The speed and quality isn't that great due to the compression, so please check out the screenshots to see some of the details. Also, only the people I know and any potential clients and of those who have a really, really, really good reason ( you know, say, you want to pay for it or you have the power to get me more exposure) for viewing this movie will be allowed to have a copy of the movie of higher quality, sorry. The original is about 241MB.

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