Hi! I want to show you a stop motion music video I did for band Seine.
For you who don’t know what stop motion is, it’s an animation technique that physically manipulates an object so that it appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence.
The differences between live-action and stop-motion lie in the disciplines you have to apply to setting up a shot. In live-action it’s easier the set up a shot because it only need to last as long as the take, but in stop motion you need to consider the long term, because there is always a opportunity for things to slowly change over the passage of time, like a light bulb slowly getting dimmer, or you accidentally move a small object with your finger or even your breath and you have to start the whole thing over again.
The cinematographer lights it, just like you would a live action set, but it's just on a miniature scale, it almost look like a diagram of a live action set.
This was my first encounter with this technique, and I must say there is nothing that can even slightly prepare you for the painful process if you’re doing it for the first time.
I thought ’’it will probably be hard and it will take a long time’’, and multiply that thought by five :)
The first thing that made our life a living hell is the sculpture because it was made out of wood,
it had wires inside but it was still hard to move it, or better say it was hard for it to stay in the same position for long, so we had to use super glue and needles to try to stick in the ground, and the wide shots where the object would walk was well...almost imposible.
When the model house and object were done (and it took months, I won’t get into that)
my director of photography Bogdan and I took it to the basement of his building and started preparing the set.
As you can see on the photo below, we had two chinese lamps and an old projector
The first two days we were not sure what we were doing, spending time just trying out stuff and cursing God Almighty why we started the project in the first place,
but slowly step by step we got the vague idea of what was possible and what was not and the compromises we would have to take compared to the original idea.
The biggest problem was there was just the two of us, so we had to split tasks smart,
we plugged the camera in the laptop and controlled the shooting button on a wireless mouse,
so that I could click the mouse, look at the monitor and do something else at the same time.
For example this shot:
Bogdan had to hold the projector and move it up-down left-right through the window making something that would look like a storm outside, and I had to click the mouse and move the hedgehog’s ears at the same time.
Last two days when we knew what we were doing were easier and faster because I already knew what shot was possible to make so there were no ’’ can we try this-try that’’, but we still had our ’’basement situation’’ that was moist and air was unbearable, and after spending eight hours a day in there for a week both of us almost got sick.
But, hey we made it!
Hope you will enjoy!
here is the link to the video
don't hesitate to comment!