practice stop motion

I had a play around with stop motion using paper models, inspired by some of the paper animations i looked at. I cut out a road, tree's and bushes and a small VW style van, all in coloured card. I used white card as an infinity screen for the backdrop. Unfortunately i shot it out fairly late at night and struggled to get enough light in the shot, but this is just a practice.

There are many problems with my first attempt -
- The camera angle is a bit too high, i think it would work better if it was more of a eye level shot rather than a high angle shot, because the objects would look better
- The camera moves a little bit, i used a tripod, but it was screwed on fairly loose and the camera needs to be really still so each picture looks the same
- The lighting is obviously an issue, i need to probably introduce some artificial light, and get it really bright, so the colours pop and the white background is really white.
- I put the song on just for some sound, but it really could do with some sound effects, like a cars engine, maybe some leaves rustling, for some verisimilitude. at the moment it is a bit flat, not very lifelike.

I'm glad that i made an attempt at stop motion, and i really enjoyed the precision of it, taking the photo's and setting up the scene. however it was very time consuming, it took 3 or 4 hours to make the props and set it up just for 5 second animation, so to make a 30 second advert would be quite difficult, however, editing afterwards is qutie quick, and putting it together isnt an issue. I'm undecided whether i will go down the stop motion route with my advert, i guess it depends on the product and the audience.