Stop motion is not for me.
Sure its fun playing with it with the kids when I don’t place any expectations on the results, mess around make stuff come to life, its a bit dodgy but who cares. The trouble start when I do care, suddenly I have that 1 multi-hour take, don’t get it right and I might have to start again, sure you can go back and teak a little, but will I ever get things exactly where I want them.
I had plenty of ideas, some involving me doing stop motion of myself scribbling out ideas for stop motion, getting distracted, wine glass filling emptying doodles on a note pad, plates building up etc. It could have worked but maybe stop motion wasn’t the best way to carry that off more timelapse and editing etc. And i couldn’t get the height out of my tripod where it needed to be for the angle I was after.
Lego animation – it’s just been done to death.
Toys, don’t bend nicely. moddled guy sags falls over etc, and I can’t realy justify buying an armature.
Days have passed and the room is slowly filling with failed ideas for stop motion. Have raided the kids toys, bits of paper, chalk, modeled figures matches etc, all passed up on for one reason or another.
An idea I liked with coriander on a black background (The coriander is growing very nicely at the moment), The ground builds into a figure, but is then blown away by the wind. Should be nice and easy. I did a few tests even filmed myself acting out the motions to get a feel of timing. Was initially disappointed by the results as no matter what lighting I set up the the coriander just didnt look as lush as it did in the garden or my imagination.
Coriander is actually very sticky sticks to my fingers the board its self, start curling up into nasty splodges, all very time consuming and frustrating particularly when large sections are inadvertently dragged across the page. After getting several frames down I did a quick calculation as to the time for the animation and promptly game up. I was never going to see it through and the coriander would have definitely given up by then also.
Ok I need something I can move with out it fighting back. I found a small worm like puppet, it always looks alive if you drag it through your fingers, can I get it to live with stop motion.
Idea – worms finds an apple, tentatively sniffs it, decides its safe goes to take a closer look and the apple leaps on the worm.
I set up In a quite location so My setup wouldn’t be bumped by my kids, did a few tests then waited for night so the lighting would be consistent.
Several hours later I have my shots (I’ was sure the images looked berret while I was capturing them,(Obviously too much staring at lights)
I must have bumped the apple at one stage as it has a little shift at one point, a few hands to cut out while I was doing the sniffing phase(lifting the nose up with a piece of cotton) but at least the story is there.
I thought I wold more closely examine the shots and capture any fill in shots/ segments the following night. Morning came and the kids decided they needed to move my stuff (It was ok they “put it all back where I had it”) ahhhh. I really don’t have the desire to do it all again from scratch so I’m going to go with what I have.
My body aches, there is no undo key, I don’t have my customary 20+ versions I can go back to, are all those stop motion guys mad.