Theme: Play and Nature
Context:
The inspiration of this week came from my dinner and PES’ creative stop motion animation Fresh Guacamole. In this imaginative animation, grenades, light bulbs, baseball and more are the ingredients for a delicious salad. After watching it, I was impressed by the concept of deftly mixing numerous subtle and brash ideas into a highly orchestrated audience experience through a combination of word play, iconic imagery and whimsy. So I decided to make a stop motion animation of natural products like fruits, leaves and give them new functions or meanings in the animation.
Method:
I'm not familiar with how to make stop motion animation. Following my own understanding of stop motion, I fixed the camera and took pictures step by step, and edited them in Pr.
Response:
The production of stop motion animation is very cumbersome, and it took me hours for seconds of animation. In order to simplify the workflow, instead of following the standard of 12 frames per second, I chose 2 frames per second and combined picture and video.
The animation has three parts, showing my associations with bananas, leaves and eggplant. This is also the process of playing them: I placed and observed them in various shapes and angles. The bananas remind me of telephone, and eggplant reminds me of cup. When I look at leaves through the sun, I think of campfire.
Reflection:
My initial idea was to make an interactive installation to display the weather in other areas in real time, but this project is huge and can't be achieved in a week. So I looked at other students' responses to this week's theme and had a brainstorm to came up with this idea. I don't have much difficulty in making this animation. The only challenge may be how to fix the camera, because I don't have a tripod. In addition, I enjoyed the production process of the project. It is very interesting. I finished it while playing and exploring. For me, this project well reflects the theme of Play and Nature and explores the diversity of stop motion animation forms. I am also glad that I can convey my personal real thoughts and feelings that I encounter or come up with at random moments through this animation.
Reference:
Fresh Guacamole by PES
PES Talks 'Fresh Guacamole' by Dan Sarto
