Proposal two:Stop Motion. April 22

Stop motion is used to give often solid items the illusion of movement. It has been present in cinematography for over 100 years and involves multiple frames being taken with slight adjustments in each then played as a fast and continuous sequence.  Stop motion has been used in both films and often in children’s TV but recently has appeared in popular culture on the internet in the form of user videos which are often found on youTube.  In fact, if you type Stop Motion in to youTube you will generate about 850,000 hits. While some of these are vey basic many of them are extremely intricate. Artist PES has 26 Stop motion videos he has created alone, and has near 100,000 subscribers to his channel. This shows how stop motion is still very much in the eye of the public still. In 2009 the video clip for “Her Morning Elegance” by Oren Lavine become a pop-art phenomena and one of the most successful stop motion videos ever. It earned a nomination in the 52nd Grammy Awards and has been screened at film festivals around the world. The video was created from 2096 still photographs that were shot and sequenced to create the sense of movement.

Her Morning Elegance can be viewed at:
http://www.hmegallery.com/

Stop motion is said to be one of the most simple and fun animation techniques, and with the high presence of digital cameras in society now this may be the reason it is so prevalent on youTube. However, being a student who is not especially creative this also seems like it could be a good way for me to do something that I perceive as quite hard to create when I watch this type of video.   

One of the most basic  things that I am going to struggle with while completing this project is  my utter lack of patience. Taking anywhere between 5 and 10 images per second of video is going to be a frustratingly slow process, however, I will try and over come this to get through this project.

Another struggle will be showing what i want to show. As of yet I do not really know what this is. I have a vague idea from which to start, but from there I hope it will develop.

My initial idea is: The time it takes a thought train to pass.

This has come from my experience in trying to come up with an idea surrounding time as a photographic concept. One idea leads to another which leads to another. Sometimes through very obvious links and other times through very random associations. I wish to explore time through its relationship with other ideas in a persons day, and show how time is ultimately related to everything.

The thinking behind this has come from a photo titled “A creative mess”. This shows a camera behind a mans head and as if it were a gun shooting him, the ideas have come out the front of his head, like blood splatter on a wall. When i go to emulate this photo I will be using this as my thought train, and each thought will be linked to the next.  



Creative Mess (2007) Highverbalfan



I have also been watching some stop motion videos to check out techniques and get ideas:

This final video ( day in the life of a student) seems to be what I should aim for as far as professionality and style. Its also a topic I can easily relate to.