3MF

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.

Posted by Matthew at February 11, 2008 05:55 PM