animation project progress
For some reason, when I first heard about this project, I immediately thought of Yoplait yogurt and the ad campaign they used to use with angels in heaven. I thought that I could create kind of an absurd, ridiculous, lighthearted representation of heaven and hell. I was thinking about creating a story either through a diaporama or through digital animation, although I’m not quite sure how difficult that would be. The story is food, or more specifically, yogurt-centered, focusing on the taste of heaven, with Yoplait whips yogurt representing a slice of heaven and other yogurt brands leading the path away from heaven.
This idea also got me thinking about tastes and how people always say the common expression that something “tastes like heaven,” so maybe I could create an animation about that as well, taking a more literal translation of it.
Another idea I had was from the fact that Yoplait used a representation of heaven in their commercials. There are many other ads that have used the concept of heaven and hell and have referenced them in their campaigns, and I was thinking about maybe meshing these ads together into one cohesive form or story.
Update: So for the project, I have decided to use many advertisements and pop culture references of angels/heaven and hell/the devil from movies to Philly Cream Cheese, and merge them into kind of a fairytale about the stereotypical corruption of fame and getting caught up in that whole lifestyle. I want to create a typical fairytale starting off with the innocent and naive Kraft angel from Philly heaven who gets caught up in the supposed City of Angels—Los Angeles, with some ad references in between, and narrate it like a storybook using either a diaporama, which I think might be easiest, or white board animation. I think my biggest challenge will be that if I use a diaporama, I will have to come up with a lot of images that I might not be able to create without either Photoshop or a lot of props, so maybe a white board animation will be kind of fun too, especially since it will create a whole storybook effect that way.
storyboard
Update: For my animation, I’ve laid out a storyboard and created a narration to go along with it. I still need to figure out how to record my own audio into iMovie so that the animation will read like a storybook or a typical fairytale because that’s how I’ve made my story to mirror, but I will also incorporate background music as well. I’ve decided that a form of a combination between a diaporama and claymation will probably be the easiest way to go, so I’m going to be using some easy modeling clay to form my characters and merge pictures of them, because given the settings of my story and the costumes that would be involved, using real props and people would most likely be more difficult than modeling them out of clay. One of my main concerns is that the animation as I have it planned out right now might be a little too long, but I think that once I get started, it won’t be too difficult to make sure I stay within the time constraints.
Update: 
Here are some production stills of my final animation video. I actually ended up doing mainly a stop motion animation with figures made out of modeling clay and cotton balls for the clouds, but there are some aspects of it that seem like a diaporama, because I included pictures as well. The figures were especially hard to get to stand up and photograph at the same time, but I managed to get them to stay upright for the shots that I needed. I narrated the story to go along with the pictures like a storybook, and there is background music as well to fit into the mood of the scene. I actually ended up going over the alotted 2 minute time requirement, and I did manage to cut some of the video, but not enough, and it would be difficult to shorten the video without cutting out some of the narration now. But, hopefully I will be able to find a way to fix that and shorten the video a little bit to fit under two minutes.
Update: So I was able to shorten my animation! It’s still about 7 seconds over the 2 minute requirement, but I redid the narration and tried to say it as fast as possible without rushing too much, and I edited the video to fit the new narration. It came out to 2 minutes and seven seconds.