Stop Motion Animation of Falling

For my stop motion animation, I knew I wanted to use one of my Tsum Tsums [soom sooms] as the object falling. After giving some thought of what I wanted to do for my animation, I was inspired by The Lion King Tsum Tsum edition as I was reminded with one of the most painful memories of my childhood—Mufasa's death.

To accomplish this, I wanted to reenact the scene with Scar pushing Mufasa off the cliff. I went to my backyard where my mom has this huge rock that was perfect for the scene. Before I started taking pictures, I would drop the Mufasa Tsum Tsum to see its path of action for reference. I would also re-watch the scene of how Mufasa falls in the movie. After watching the scene a couple of times, I noticed how Scar flings Mufasa off to his death, giving him a tipping motion. For each frame, I took a picture after the other. I first taped the Mufasa Tsum Tsum to rock, and after having the Scar Tsum Tsum push him off, I taped it to a sharpening stick to create the falling motion. I used Adobe Photoshop to edit the stick and myself out of the frame. After I was done editing, I imported all the photos to Adobe Premiere to create the animation video.

Since I had so much fun doing this assignment, the video below stars James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, and Jonathan Taylor Thomas along with composer Hans Zimmer. Enjoy! :D