Something Somewhere Sometime – Stop Motion Final Project

It’s finally time!

My final stop motion video is completed, and it’s ready for its’ debut!

The music that goes along with the video is Something Somewhere Sometime by Ben Sollee and Daniel Martin Moore.

Get ready for some adventure…and if you’re interested in seeing the ‘dark’,  I’m-going-crazy-talking-to-plasticine-worms side of stop motion animation, stick around for the bloopers at the end.

Enjoy!

I chose to do a stop motion animation film because I became fascinated with it this semester while learning about digital storytelling.  Films like Her Morning Elegance and The Olympus Pen Story inspired me with their elegant beauty.  There is something unmatched about seeing every small motion a person or object makes.  I found it made me think harder about the films and pay closer attention.

I think stop motion would be a fantastic way to explore digital storytelling and the science of motion with students, even students of fairly young ages.  In this video, a ten year old boy adds his break dancing action figure using stop motion.  I learned a  lot about movement making this video.  It is certainly a challenge to think of everything in terms of isolated actions.

I won’t deny there weren’t frustrations along the way.  Making a stop motion film is a tedious process. Over 1500 pictures make up the 2.5 minute video I’m presenting, and little plasticine worms don’t always do exactly as you’d like all by themselves!

The process I used to make the film is perhaps a bit different.  Because I don’t have a well functioning camera, I used my video camera to take running film, in which I would step out of the frame, rearrange the scene, step out of the frame, rearrange the scene…etc (see the bloopers section), and then captured over 1500 still frames from the running film using FlipShare technology once the videos were uploaded to my computer.  I imported all of the photos into iMovie and set the pictures to appear for .03 seconds each.  I found iMovie really easy to use and it was a great way to put this stop motion together, especially because there are so many editing options.

Last week I ran into a standstill and could not get much filming done, but I was lucky to have some great help from my cousins Emily and Lauren, who (naturally) were naturals at this kinda stuff.  Thanks ladies!

To view other videos and steps in the process leading up to this final product, see the blog category Final Project.

Thanks for checking out my final project!  Let me know what you think!