Completed: 2021
Skill Set: Animation, Papercraft
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DESCRIPTION
Stop Motion is something I’ve always wanted to do, so in the fall of 2021, I took a course on it. Here are the three animated shorts that came from that class.
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“LOW BUDGET LUXO” (top)
For the shots where he’s in the air, I wore a matte green opera glove and held him in place, then keyed it out using After Effects. I recorded all the foley by repeating the lamp’s actions into a Sennheiser MKE 600 shotgun mic.
“IF AT FIRST” (middle)
Every element in this piece was cut out of cardstock and moved using X-acto blades. To get the overhead shot, I built four legs out of Duplo bricks, laid a plexiglass panel across the top, and put my phone in the center of the glass.
“MOO EFF OHH” (bottom)
In order to get floating objects without having to edit out armatures in post, I set up a glass pane perpendicular to the camera, constructed the UFO out of two separate halves, and held them in place using magnets. The cardstock cow was also held in place using magnets.
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METHODOLOGY
I shot all of these on my iPhone 11 using the Stop Motion Studio app. I exported raw video files from there and brought them into Premiere Pro, where I tweaked the timing (slowing down sections was made super smooth using the Optical Flow Time Interpolation setting), added music and SFX, and graded the color.
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CRITIQUE
Of course there are things that make each of these look home-brewed and amateur. That’s because they are. What I’m proud of here is not so much the end product, as the problem solving that went on behind the scenes.
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