Stop Motion workshop

Today we had a stop motion workshop where we had three toys to practise making an animation, using iStopMotion on the macs. Unfortunately we only had 45 minutes to make what we could, and learn how to do it, so there's a few hands in the shot... If I were to do it professionally I'd attempt to think of a way to hold the figures so that nothing could be seen, maybe add a background, etc.

Man Ray's Rayograms.

I first learnt of Man Ray at A Level photography, and I must admit I was immediately interested in his work. Unfortunately I'd never been able to experiment with Rayograms as we didn't have a darkroom. But I scanned things instead and just changed them to greyscale images. Worked quite well, but lost the creativity a little.
Man Ray was a Dadaist so was trying to find new ways of creating art and fighting against what was defined as 'art'. Rayograms/rayographs are made without a camera, simply by placing various objects on sensitized paper in a dark room, ex- posing them briefly to a single ray of light.
Today however, I was able to actually use Man Ray's technique as it should be used, in a darkroom. We were told to bring objects of our choice, and so here are what I took:

Glass teddybear ornament.

Birds near a pond(?) ornament.

Bubble wrap.

Chain necklace.

I chose these objects as most on transparent or reflective, so the light would hit them differently. 

First we needed to do an exposure tester to see how it would come out, and then use the exposure we wanted for the whole thing:

5-20 seconds

I decided on 15 seconds as you could see more clearly where the refraction of the light hit the paper.

Final:

Mexican Stand-off.

So my music really reminds me of a mexican stand-off so I'm going to see where this direction takes me. Mexico and the song also remind me of a sombrero and mostly the song, bring to mind a scorpion tapping its feet, walking on the ground, so of a rattling? 

To start off my ideas, I thought of the scorpion with his sombrero down as the music starts of intensely, and as it goes on, he pushes it up, as they do in the movies with cowboy hats.

Three Words:

MEXICO

FUN

STAND-OFF

Existing Animations

Popular Animations:

• Disney animated films such as Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Bambi, etc
• Pokemon
• Digimon
• Zoids
• Sonic
• Who Framed Rodger Rabbit 
• Morph
• The Nightmare Before Christmas 
• Grinch
• Wallace & Gromit

and much much more.

Disney DVDs often show cut scenes that didnt make it onto the film, and it's usually shown in drawn animation before it's coloured and digitalised. The amount of work that goes into those films, it's no wonder they're so expensive.

as well as film, animation is used in many other things such as:

music videos:

Concierto De Aranjuez (Part Two Ending)

First thoughts:

• Spanish - Mexico?
• trumpets
• starts off happy, gets slower, sadder.
• red bull flag - warm colours
• tumble weed
• scorpion tapping? walking? 
• triumph? struggle? 
• elephants?
• ..

It was the first thing I thought of...

As soon as I knew that Print to Pixel was about stop motion/animations I thought of Blu, which I found on YouTube that a friend suggested to me a year ago now. Their work is based on graffitiing walls and painting over to create the next slide.


Other stop motion/animations:

Disney Zoetrope



Bird Zoetrope



Post-It Note Dealine - Stop Motion