Result!

When it came to shooting I ended up deciding on utilising the time-lapse function on Dragon. The sheer amount of objects moving meant it would have taken far too long to manually capture given the time I had left.

Anyway, here's the video~

Overall I'm quite pleased with how this has turned out. Since this is my first piece of stop-motion it was quite a challenge to get everything moved in only 20 seconds, and the panic of trying to make everything move at once is clear in areas where the movements are jerky and the composition of the objects generally messy. It seems I hadn't quite matched up the amount of frames needed to capture my idea, and so there were many frames left over in which I had to improvise. However I feel these parts actually turned out better for it after having gotten into the swing of it all.

Another problem was the impracticality of the gloves that this whole idea sprung up from! I never took into account that it'd be awkward to place cards and move the little E4 logos around with them on, so often the placement of them is very haphazard... especially on the sunglasses and in the pages of the book.

With more time I definitely would have followed my plan exactly and made the movements more neat and fluid. That way the drawn part at the very end could have been a lot more interesting and detailed as I'd planned.

Still, if time allows it I may be able to add visual effects such as grains and lighting as I'd intended initially; also I could use camera movements to focus on the best parts of the animation and make it all more dynamic.

Further development...

After gathering all my objects, and with shooting imminent, I played around with them on a piece of board to get a better idea of how I want the general formation of the 'set' to look once it's all together (bear in mind my actual background will be black).

This first image was my initial layout as I'd sketched it in my roughs, but somehow I wasn't pleased with how it looked. The addition of the pieces of bone and the Ouija board meant I had to rethink the layout, so I messed about further and settled on the next image.

 I think the balance of objects is much nicer here; also the addition of the glasses works well. The next thing is to decide how all these objects will move as I lay them out, which will already be there when shooting begins, how long they'll remain in shot for and so on. I'll make a separate storyboard for this in order to have a clear idea in mind when it comes to shooting.

Another way to add depth to this idea, I feel, would be to hide the E4 logo in different areas so the audience have to spot them. 

Places I can hide the logo:

• Inside the matchbox,
• among the pages of the book, 
• appearing from behind the car,
• flickering beneath where the glass marker lies on the Ouija board,
• on one or more of the playing cards

If there's enough going on so that the audience might spot something new on a second viewing, rather than just building up to one big and obvious reveal, then the final outcome will be a lot more exciting as a whole.