“Once upon a time there was a group who filmed stop motion. They happily filmed stop motion with no disagreements. In the end, they had a great immigration movie and lived happily ever after!”
That’s how I wish the story went. But currently my group’s story looks more like this:
“Once upon a time there was a group who filmed stop motion. There were a ton of disagreements. And showing carpet/desk in the corners of the movie. Along with that they were only halfway through.”
Of course its not all rain. There are some rainbows! But in general, making a movie isn’t an simple process. For one, there ware the clashing disagreements.
Clashing disagreements are times when my group members and I clash head to head. It could be as small as making “thought bubbles” dance, or as big as what immigrant cutout we would use in our stop motion. There were certainty a lot of them. Some were resolved, some weren’t, and some ended with a compromise! For example, Jonah wanted to put the Statue of Liberty on screen for the whole movie, and I didn’t want to use the statue of liberty at all. In the end, the agreement we came to was that the Statue of Liberty would be onscreen for half the movie. That was the fashion we resolved most disagreements, in a half and half matter. For example…
Disagreement –> Result:
Two different immigrant cutouts. Which one to use? –> We used one immigrant cutout half the time, another one for the other half.
Dancing thought bubbles? –> The thought bubbles danced for the first two thoughts.
But some disagreements couldn’t be resolved with the simple “half-half” solution. For example, one major disagreement my group had was “paper vs. puppets”. I was intent on using paper for our stop motion, and Jonah and Ronald wanted a mix. I fought hard, but outvoted, I eventually gave into puppets and paper. And I thought that was the end of the argument. But later in the movie prepping, it became clear that making puppets would be too much work. So I won the argument, and we just used paper.
But I didn’t win all the arguments. And sometimes it was for the better. For example, when my group first started filming, some edges of carpet were showing, but I said it was “good enough”. But my group didn’t agree, and, even though it took a lot of time, we ended up with a better setup and survived the “trial by your stop motion better be neat” (see my last post on immigration.) From that experience I learned that it’s always important to listen to other people’s ideas ideas (though I still have trouble actually doing it.)
All in all, stop motion so far has been an amazing process. From the disagreements to the successes, its all been an amazing process!