Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Stop Motion Fun with Cans

Recently, we had a sweet Cloverton concert with Delusions of Pluto. The cost of admission was 3 cans of food, which are going to a local food pantry led by Panhandle Love In Action. As the pile of cans grew before the concert, I thought "It would have been cool to have set up a stop motion video of the counter as the cans were collected." Good thought... too late.

But, last Thursday morning, I stole my wife's camera, set it up on a tripod, and dumped out a box of cans to play. (Is it ever ok to play with someone else's food?) I've never done a stop motion video before... just thought it would be fun. It was. I learned a few things though:
  • Fewer moving parts would have been a good idea!
  • More pictures = better.
  • Small movements make for less stop, more motion.
  • Stop motion takes a lot of time.
It's fun to experiment, and just so I don't keep all the fun for myself, here is my first jerky jump into the stop motion world. Also debuting is the compositional skill of my soon to be 9 year old son, Dakota. He's been messing around with Pattern Music on my iPad and I used something he composed for some background music (based on his recent obsession with Phineas & Ferb). I'm much more impressed with the results of his technological experimentation than with my own!

3 comments:

  1. There's my can! THAT'S MY CAN!

    Stop motion, while pretty fun, is incredibly time-consuming. I learned this when filming a legomation stop-motion movie of the Old Testament my first year at Summit. Awesome concept. Bad timeline. We ended up with like .1% of the OT actually getting done.

    But we killed Goliath with a crossbow. Hey-oh!

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  2. So, did you end up using iMovie to put it together?

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  3. Yes, Ted. I dropped the pictures in there (without the Ken Burns) and set the time for each one at a little less than half a second with no transitions. I did check out that Frame By Frame app a little, too and I think I could have exported from there as a video file into iMovie, then added the audio. Not sure if one way would be better or not...

    Thanks for the can Alex!

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