Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Sunglasses




Click here for the movie! (MPEG-4 format, 452 KB)


This is my first successful stop-motion animation videoblog post. One thing I really wish I'd done with the Dummies book was include more on animated videoblogs, but I guess I can do that with articles or perhaps another book (we had to cut pages from the Dummies book as it is).

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I tried doing a stop-motion animation vlog with some toy dinosaurs. It was a phenomenal failure-- I couldn't do anything right. Everything was out of focus. I wound up trashing the whole project, but I was glad I had tried. For one thing, it showed me how things aren't always as easy as I think they will be. For another, it made me go out and learn more about stop-motion animation. I read a website on it, and downloaded a program called Frame Thief that does the single-frame capture necessary to do stop motion animation. After that, I got out a prop (my sunglasses) and some fishing line (to manipulate the prop like a puppet) and set about making my first stop-motion animation video. Added a short audio track of me whistling tunelessly, just to fill the silence.

It's short and completely unplanned, but I think it came out pretty well, don't you?

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