It was nothing special. It was Doctor Octopus chasing spiderman on foot (totally not how it would play out in real life). However, it was enough to light a fire in my little mind.
Over the next few weeks I would construct more and more elaborate sets. It culminated in a man crossing the road of a small LEGO town. This would be my last stop motion project. It took 2 hours to process everything on the computer. Plus editing. I thought the computer was going to explode!
Fast forward a few years and I am ready to try it again.
I had the idea to do a lyric video for a song (really any song), with the words all animating on from all directions. Markers and crayons tumble across the screen in explosions of color. A Toy Story for art supplies. The only issue was I needed a song.
Thankfully, Pip Lucas (from AFT) loves stop motion as well. So when I made the suggestion, it was pretty much a done deal.
"'This should only take a few days'" said naive me with a big smile. Oh how wrong I was!
It started out with getting supplies. The goal was an explosion of color... so nothing that looked "normal" was allowed.
Then we had to make the letters... Pip and I spent around 20 hours on that alone....
I'd like to think we're both going to be able to out scissor our kids at craft time in 15 years... I guess we'll have to wait and see on that.
After the cutting came production. That took approximately 14 days longer than the estimated 2...
I learned a lot about time budgeting and how bad I am at it over this project!
Normal film is 24 frames per second. That's like taking 24 pictures every second and then running them together really fast. Stop motion uses the same concept, but it's all manual. Move things a centimetre, take a picture. Move a centimetre, take a picture. Apparently that takes more time than I remember it taking when I was a kid!
After listening to roughly 6 Relevant Podcasts, multiple CDs, a sermon and a dozen hours of the Slam, the shoot was done!
As I finished, I turned around to see paper strewn throughout my work area... I guess I'm gonna need to clean that up...
Once I got it into my computer (different from the first one... thankfully!). It was time to makes some fixes. There were some wrong lyrics on the lyric sheet I had... which meant I had to use Photoshop and recreate some new letters... I also managed to misspell "Directed". Which I still think is hilarious. I never noticed. No one I showed it to noticed... until I had everything edited, and someone caught it. Thank God for that!. Stop motion takes a lot of focus apparently.
After all of that. We're done. I will have the video here to absorb into your visual cortex next week!
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