Making Ramen in Stop Motion
For my first animation assignment, I paired up with Rachel Costas to create a stop motion video. Both Rachel and I knew we wanted to make something with food, and started looking for inspiration on Instagram (I never knew there were so many stop motion artists in Instagram until Rachel opened up that world to me).
We were particularly inspired by these two pieces of work:
I have an undying love for the taste and aesthetic of a bowl of ramen noodles, and thought the ketchup-bottle-to-tomato scheme could work for hard-boiled eggs too. That was how we decided that we wanted to show the process of creating a nice, yummy looking bowl of ramen with hair tools!
We searched for a generic traditional Japanese ramen recipe to list out what materials we could play with. Then we brainstormed the different ways we can play with hair tools for each ingredient. We created our storyboard to visualize these different scenes.
On the day of our shoot, we found a small phone booth on campus and turned it into our shooting studio. Materials were prepped before starting the shoot to streamline the process as best we could. It took us a while to set up DragonFrame, the program that we were using to capture our photos and easily turn them into a stop motion movie. The only other task that we spent a lot of time and effort on was figuring out how to boil our fresh egg on campus, where there was no stove top. I ended up putting the egg into a hand-held water boiler and freaked a few of my classmates out when they went to get water for their tea, lol.
Our stop motion studio, with two desk lamps, a studio light, Canon Mark III, a tripod, and a yellow paper backdrop.
Ramen ingredients: stars of our show!
Rachel and I setting up (and snacking on) the ramen ingredient spread.
I decided on the shooting sequence based on the amount of effort it takes to deal with that particular ingredient. For example, corn and seaweed salad were both wet and would mess up our backdrop, so we decided to start off with dry ingredients like the naruto roll and scallions to avoid changing our backdrop more times than necessary.
Rachel was our hand model and did an amazing job holder her poses so still while making micro movements between each shutter. I was controlling the camera and DragonFrame while directing Rachel’s movements.
Before getting into this process, I had imagined the transitions within stop motion to be easier executed than it actually was. While we were trying to shoot the scene where Rachel cuts the naruto roll with a comb, I had thought she would simply put the comb on top of the roll and down in front before I place a piece that was already sliced in front of the comb. I thought if we made multiple shots and move through them quickly, it would naturally look like she was cutting into it. But nope! It looked super fake! Rachel ended up having to cut the naruto with a knife in the middle of the shoot while holding her other hand’s position extremely still. It turned out amazing!
My favorite scene of this entire movie is squeezing out the hard-boiled egg! I studied the tomato example and realized the artist had used red clay to form the growing stages of the tomato. We took the same approach and used white clay to mold our tiny hard-boiled egg fetus. The result is pure magic~
We pushed through and finished our shoot within half a day. I exported all of our 900+ photos from DragronFrame as a .mov file and made my cuts on Adobe Premiere Pro. I rearranged the scenes from the original storyboard to balance our overall compositions within the sequence. And because we started shooting in the afternoon but finished after sunset, some of our last scenes turned out darker compared to the first shots. I spent some time on color grading to try my best to keep visual consistency.
And finally, once I was happy with the cut, I added sound effects to make the experience as realistic as it is magical. I downloaded sounds from https://freesound.org/ and https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/.
Overall, I am extremely happy with the work we have created within just two days! I learned so much about the work that goes into creating a satisfying stop-motion. The frame-by-frame mentality will definitely help me on my future animation projects.