48 hour video race

I had a blast with the 48 hour video race! Seriously, I live for this kind of stuff. I’ve always felt that my work comes out best when I’m under severe pressure. I remember when I picked up the mystery props I started to conceptualize what sort of film I wanted to make. Something trippy, I thought, experimental, with lots of movement. At that moment I decided that I would be doing this movie using my Kodak easy share still camera. Although this camera had a video setting I thought it would be more fun/challenging to do it all with still photos. At first I planned on mixing these photos in with some found footage, and maybe even animating some of the movement in aftereffects, but after I saw that we had shot more footage then was necessary to the one minute, I decided to let go of those ideas and instead spend my available time on perfecting the editing of the stuff I already had. I didn’t actually start working on this until Wednesday of that week. One of my best friends here was kind enough to help me, which was pretty fantastic, I don’t know anybody else who would sit around with me for five straight hours working on taking 800 + photographs of jars slowly moving around, lol. When I was shooting the stop motion, I basically went off from my experience with the multi plane assignment we did earlier this year. This is probably why I ended up taking more photographs then was actually necessary. I started off shooting each separate movement five different times, eventually that got extremely frustrating, since my camera sometimes takes up to twenty seconds to process one single photograph. Eventually I went to shoot each action twice. Ironically when I brought the images into final cut, it didn’t seem like those extra three shots made much of a difference. What I had forgotten about during the shoot, is that one can slow animation down to as low as ten frames per second, and still have it look good, which is what I ended up doing during editing. For some reason played at 24fps the footage looked pretty terrible, really jumpy, and didn’t give the viewer enough time to register what was going on on screen. So I slowed it down. One really cool thing that my friend suggested ended up working surprisingly well. We decided to use the song “One more time” by daft punk to go along with the stop motion. He thought it would be neat to play this song over and over again while we were working. I don’t know how it happened, but I think it influenced us subconsciously, because when I went to edit in the music, it almost seemed to fit perfectly. I actually think we’re going to be working with stop motion again next week, not for school. I’ve been a giant fan of Tool’s stop motion videos for years, although I must admit I don’t actually listen to them all that much unless I’m watching something they created, and I would love to be able to do something equally amazing at some point soon. The only regret I have about this assignment is that I wish I would have tried several other camera less filmmaking techniques, like using a scanner or copier, but I guess I could always try those things on my own time. I’m a firm believer that once an idea is formed and the method for producing that idea is set, the best work comes when people still to their original plan. I know this from experience, because I used to be that person that would completely change their project or paper half way through, and the results were always less than favorable.