Rustington singer releases new song with her own stop motion animation

“This is one of my songs on my new self-produced album. I have been writing new material for it for about a year now. I am currently writing and recording the album and am hoping to get it released this year.

“I go walking with my dog George every day all over the place and decided to write a song about spending quality time with someone and wanting to be with that someone all the time with the use of a good imagination as well.

“I have been teaching myself stop motion animation for about six months now. I didn’t want to be in my music videos so thought why not make an animation! Something different. You don’t often see animated music videos. For a start they are incredibly expensive to make but I thought, well, I shall have a go.

“I created my first animation last year for my song called Tell Me Something Brave. It’s pretty basic but it was so much fun that I created another at Christmas. With this new animation I wanted to create a better one. I like to try to improve every time I do them. I used an original character I made from my first animation and this time he has a love interest, Molly. They are on a first date and he’s trying to impress as they roam around places. This time because I wanted to improve I bought some modelling clay that the well-known Aardman animations work with on Wallace & Gromit. It was well worth the investment!

“I found it so much easier to work with. I used a cake box for some scenes and I had saved a black hamper box for others as well as using our kitchen work top. Unfortunately I don’t have a big studio to work in so I make good use of whatever I have around the home. It’s about imagination. I made the books and drums from fondant as they didn’t need to move around like the figures and made lots of different heads.

“I drew a story board with ideas and scenes on paper so I had a guide. Some scenes were added from the top of my head as I went along. I took about a week to prepare everything; then I filmed the scenes in another week.

“It’s hard work and time consuming. But if you have the patience you see good results, I hope! I don’t think some people realise what goes into making stop motion animation. For instance, the picnic scene is 20 seconds of finished film and consists of 241 photos. And then we have the drum scene with Bert and Molly which is 13 seconds of film and consists of 209 photos. That involves moving the figures little by little, snapping a photo each time you move the figure. Creating a video for just over three minutes takes a lot of effort. I then turned it into cartoon style for a different effect. There was a lot of growling from me when things were not going as planned and my poor dog hid a few times!”