Strange New Places

After almost a year of blogging (if you include the facebook origins) I decided I'd like to have a go at editing together some footage of my own. Just a short story, something frivolous. And so, inspired by the Youtube videos of Patrick Boivin I present Spartan-II Review Episode 1



How whimsical. Here is a 'Making of'.



What I like about this Patrick Boivin fellow is that he makes incredibly professional stop motion animation using the resources available to anyone (anyone who can afford a digital camera and a computer). He's also kind enough to show us how he does it:



Flick through his Youtube channel and you'll find a lot of excellent animation, but all of them are missing something: narrative. The majority of Patrick's animated films involve fighting or dancing or skateboarding, but no story beyond the activity taking place. This is a petty criticism considering the quality of his work and bearing in mind they are just short films destined for Youtube, but it's a reminder that story is more important than spectacle - Aardman and Pixar don't win Oscars just for the quality of their animation.

As I have been discovering, shooting and editing footage in stop motion is tricky enough without having to worry about a coherent narrative. My story is simple enough: three toy Halo figures appear in my front room and start watching DVDs, the next few episodes will be a review of a film by each of the cast (I plan to make three more but we'll see how that goes). Animating the figures was straightforward enough but once I separated them from each other and they were no longer all in the same shot, it became problematic. I hope it makes sense that the yellow one climbs up onto the TV and then onto the DVD shelf. Animating it would not have been impossible, just very time consuming. Shooting against a green screen makes it easier but there's no way of knowing how it will tun out, and a lot of work can be for nothing. Ultimately, it's a question of how much time is worth putting in for the end result.

Hopefully I'll finish episode 2 sometime in January. Check out my Youtube channel.