3MF

Putting It Together

I was in the mood to work on a puzzle this weekend and Maria and Ann offered to help. I thought it might be fun to capture our progress on film, so i get up my camera to take time-lapse shots. The camera took one picture every minute and then i put them all together in iMovie. You can see the short film i call "Putting It Together" on YouTube although the image compression takes away a lot of the detail. It's slighly better on Facebook.

It took some work to actually get the camera in place. I quickly realized that i don't have very many tall things in my apartment. I ended up securing my camera to my large wooden battle spoon (large, as in 5 feet long) and then propped that up on one end on top of an open kitchen cabinet door and on the other end on top of a stack of cardboard boxes. I'm really surprised the whole thing didn't topple over at some point. I also can't believe that the battery in the camera lasted as long as it did. It took 538 pictures over the course of nearly 9 hours. I was up till 3:30 am finishing the puzzle.

Cupcake Dance

As soon as i saw the stack of cupcakes made inedible by an over-dose of baking soda, i knew i wanted to do something special with them. Here is the result. It's a movie i call Cupcake Dance.

I had always wanted to make a stop motion animated movie and when i saw that iStopMotion was in the latest MacHeist bundle, i snapped it up. This was the perfect excuse to try it out. I hooked my computer up to my Nikon S200 to snap the images. In total there are 1019 still images in this video at 15 fames per second.

My set up was far from ideal. I didn't have a tripod so i set up some boxes i had lying around. On top of that i put a wire cooking rack so i could place my camera on top and have the USB cord run underneath. I had to put my keyboard in front of the computer so i could bridge between the camera and the software. I also don't have an AC adapter for my camera and the batter went out twice during the shoot. You can see the film jump because it was impossible to get things to line up again after i swapped out the battery. Below is a picture of my make-shift studio.

I'm really happy with how it turned out considering it my first ever animated film. I'd love to make more if only it didn't take so darn long. Most of my weekend was consumed with planning and creating a 1 minute of finished animation. But when i see stuff like My Paper Mind by Javan Ivey or The Human Flipbook i get inspired.

Cupcakes

In this world, there are two kinds of cupcakes: those that are yummy, and those that have 2 tablespoons of baking soda rather than 2 teaspoons as indicated by the recipe. It's not too hard to tell the difference.