Response to Feedback

I put the video on Padlet to get feedback: http://padlet.com/tjmov16/srtudz8frgc
I do agree with what people have said: 'The structure of the buildings are fantastic' - I put a lot of effort into making the different houses with their individual details and I am very pleased with the way they look.
I do not agree that this is a professional looking animation, though I did animate it professionally, with artificial white light and a white backdrop to perform as the sky. I do not think it looks professional because the first 1000 images were test shots and the lighting changes slightly on all the alternate frames of the long shots (which I cut from the rendered film).
Overall, though most of it is a smooth animation, I am not entirely pleased with the end result. Though the buildings do look pretty good.

My Animation

Barbara

This is my animation. I am not particularly pleased with the way it has turned out as the animation is not how I planned it to be.
I animated Barbara over 3 days, amounting to 2065 frames for the overall animation (some test shots).
As the iMacs we were working on and the shared area could not hold the 15 GB of photographs in their raw sizes (large), I had to import the first 1000 (most of which were test shots) onto the computer and animate 20 images at a time in iStomMotion. When I imported the images into iStopMotion the system crashed. I tried multiple methods of animating the 1000 images, such as moving to other computers and using different software but the computers still crashed.
I did not have time to re-size the images at home, which I realise may have worked better on the machines, and the computers in college could not function well enough to process the images to re-size them.
On some of the frames, the puppet had to be supported, so I had to individually airbrush each shot in Photoshop.

Monty Python

I decided to turn back to my original idea of creating a Terry Gilliam style animation using cut-outs. I initially wanted to help a friend on his animation but I took too much control over the project that it became my own and I feel I may have wasted his time. I created some shapes in Photoshop out of images found on Google (which I had edited the shape and colours of to replicate the Monty Python cartoons). Me and my friend spent a day trying to print the images as all the printers we tried were either b/w or broken, I cut out all the images and put them in the right shapes to resemble characters with different sections so as to operate the puppets without using too many replacements.

When I animated the sequence, we had to delete some work on the Mac to save the animation (though the whole animation wasn't very large and only lasted about 50 seconds). I animated it by moving each cutout a piece at a time for every frame in the movie, I had to concern the 3D environment in the 2D animation which can be difficult when animating one moving object behind a stationary cutout.
The animation itself I was very pleased by, I may even say it was the best animation I had ever done despite the low camera quality and lack of sound (to be added). The animation followed a man with the face of a friend of ours, veiny hands and woman's legs wearing a large black coat walking into shot. The man had magenta skin and made three loud chicken noises before laying a large oversized egg which propelled the character into the air and out of shot. The egg was still but occasionally wobbled and then cracked open (the cracks were drawn using a biro pen). When the egg shattered, an even larger head (of another friend) emerged with stumpy baby legs and sidestepped out of shot while making odd animal noises with it's mouth. The black coated man flew through the sky and knocked down a
few clouds as if they were held up by string (the smoothness of the animation, particularly in the way the head creature walked and squawked and as the clouds fell over was impressive even to me). The man crashed down in the path of the head creature, which walked up to the man and ate his head and shoulder before himself collapsing to the ground. It was the quality of the animation in the last scene alone that I was particularly impressed by - the way the man landed, the head walked and the way it chewed it's food (and the bite marks left on the man).
Unfortunately after i had rendered the file into a playable video format, someone deleted both the animation and the exported movie at some point not long after, I don't know who and why but it meant that I could no longer use my new animation.

Barbara (again)

I took the animated first 1000 test shots and edited them into a short 40 second short film using Adobe Premiere. I did not have any sound for the animation because I didn't think I would be using it, so I just rendered some royalty free music over the edit, added some sound effects (not as much as was needed) and recorded the voice of the character shouting Barbara (which the voice actor had forgot, meaning the final result is only a guess at the voice and not the actual voice itself).
The reason the character of Barbara has such huge legs is because the man is shouting 'Barbara! You're taller than me!' among other insults and various pines.