I Love My Mummy

So here’s a little stop motion animation I did in my thesis year of college. It was the fall of 2009 and I was taking an Intro to Stop Motion class being conducted by this man. It is a little rough around the edges (literally) but I actually have a legitimate excuse.

From 2008-2010, I was rocking a Mac Pro: a mammouth of a machine not to be confused with a “MacBook Pro.” As such, I could not bring my computer to class and take advantage of the wonderful and aptly named software: iStopMotion.

The solution to this was using what is called a video lunchbox. This device was literally shaped like an old school lunchbox and connected to a DV camcorder. In order to actually see what I was shooting, I was connected to an NTSC CRT monitor, which was big, boxy, (somewhat too heavy for me to lift) and frighteningly antiquated. Now, because this was a a video monitor, the edges of my frame were impossible to see. Hence why there is stuff popping up on the edges of my animation.

The other unfortunate side-effect of shooting on this lunchbox was having to transfer the footage I shot with an analog video interface in the school’s animation labs. The result of this was actually losing half of the frames I animated. The result was stop motion fluidity that was more reminiscent of the Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer Christmas Special as opposed to something more fluid and high quality like The Nightmare Before Christmas or Coraline.

Overall, this was my first serious go at trying to animate a stop motion armature. I was fairly pleased with it, as I was working on something quite a lot more involved during my thesis year.

On a less technical note: I actually came up with the “script” for this piece during one of my advanced Pro Tools classes (hence the kick ass audio track) and I animated this and one other piece the day it was due…during the class. Fortunately at SVA because classes only met once a week, and this was a studio class…it was something like 4 or 5 hours long. Maybe it was 3 hours. I can barely remember what happened this year let alone what happened in 2009 (there’s an excuse for that too, but one that I will not go into here)