Stop motion loop

This assignment was done with Michal Shoshan.

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Michal and I met and we started discussing ideas — we were looking to film something, because none of us has a lot experience in that field so we agreed this is a good opportunity to try that out.

We took a moment to discuss how to differentiate and characterize this medium of stop motion from any other animation field. We recalled seeing Her Morning Elegance, a beautiful stop motion video, and thought that its use of space and environment was really smart and helped frame the story.

We came up with several directions, but one stood out more than the rest, and that was using an existing grid. Another source of inspiration was a music video called Moon. It utilizes a grid of plain white stickers that are being drawn on, removed, and pasted.

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We were looking for such grids around us, in ITP, and considered using the book shelves in one of the phone rooms, or the tables or red boxes that are on the floor. But we really wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing and almost graphic. Eventually and after a couple of quick tests we decided to go with the lockers beside the classrooms. The lockers offered a monochromatic grid based layout, whose cells we could keep open, closed, or somewhere in the middle — so a lot to work with.

When we started shooting we realized the fluorescent lighting near the lockers posed a problem — it just made it all look... not as we imagined. However, we decided we would use post effects to get the outcome we had hoped for.

We tried many different variations; At first, every opening or closing of a locker was going to take 4 frames. But the angle of filming was constrained and made it look not as crisp as we planned. We switched to working with either open or closed lockers which was closer to what we had in mind, although the filming angle still didn't allow all the lockers to look precisely aligned.

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We set out to create some movement, using the grid as a whole and taking into consideration animation fundamentals, composition-based outlook and abstract storytelling.

All in all, we enjoyed working on this short stop motion video, and liked having an opportunity to experiment with that distinct medium.