On Monday I shared my tango-dancing salt and pepper shakers. How did I produce this short? Basically, I hit record on my Canon G9, set to the time-lapse video mode, and then moved my characters around like a madman — for a little more than a half hour. That’s about it.
That said, I’ll now share the some specifics of my time-lapse-stop-motion video creation workflow, as I think it is interesting. I also think that my little piece is successful because, although I started it simply to play around with technology, I ended up focusing on a story. This kept me focused, gave me motivation both to create and share, and gives my piece any value that it may have.
My Time-Lapse-Stop-Motion Experience
After finishing watching the original “Clash of the Titans” movie earlier in the day, I was pretty eager to play with stop-motion, which is something that I have never done, but which I’ve been dying to try since, well, probably about the first time I saw “Clash,” nearly 30 years ago.
While I had never tried stop motion, I’ve been recording all kinds of time-lapse movies since getting my G9 and discovering this wonderful feature. So before I went through the trouble of making a stop-motion movie, I decided to use this feature — recording a still every two seconds — to get a sense of what a stop-motion piece would look like.
Quickly setting up my camera on a tripod on the kitchen table and hitting “record,” and moving the objects at hand around, I ended up with this:
Pretty cool!, I thought.
Obviously the hairy hands aren’t supposed to show up in a stop-motion movie, but I loved the potential. So. . . Continue reading “How I Made Them Dance the Tango”
