The Grass Is Greener…

DONE! I can’t believe we did it. After days of filming and editing and putting on clothing and makeup, I can finally say I have completed my first stop-motion video! Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the artistic eye of “AshleyVis” ;).

I was laying in my cluttered bed one morning, trying to figure out how my room got so messy, and then realized that it was because I just have to try on so many things before I can get the right combination. I might sound a little obsessed with fashion, but I think it’s just another part of my creative side.. manifesting itself in my closet.

I thought, how could I keep my room tidy? Well, if I could just snap my fingers and have the clothing appear on me, that would help. Of course that’s only possible in the virtual world of stop-motion. PERFECT! Final Project, here I come.

Ashley and me decided to team up for this feat, and sadly she found videos that were almost like the idea I had in my mind. Roadblock #1. I didn’t feel so original and genius anymore, but we decided to go along with the concept anyways. 

The next question was how to shoot it? Originally we had planned on doing three different people’s “dream morning’s”, a mother and a son as well as a girl, and even incorporating a breakfast segment, but being the last week of classes, we chose sanity over complexity.

Because I have the program Pinnacle studios, it has a feature that lets you select and grab certain frames from video and create stills with those frames. I knew this would save a lot of shooting time, but we would be editing for a while. We decided to do a combination. The make-up portion was shot with a camera, and the clothing portion was with video. The camera shots turned out to be pretty high-quality. I was pretty nervous that I wouldn’t be able to put my face in the correct position to make the shots have a realistic flow, but it was fabulous! And indeed very simple to edit.

The video allowed for really easy filming, I don’t think we would have been able to shoot as much as we did without the video.. but boy was there a tedious amount of editing. We considered just leaving the frames as they were, without taking all the stills, but in the end it just didn’t seem as cohesive, and we buckled down to finish the stop-motion.

Adding sound was fairly simple.. www.findsounds.com is a great site for sound effects. And Ashley had the prefect song on her mac, “Shine On” by The Kooks.

It was hard work, but honestly the time flew by. I think we were a great team too. DEFINITELY will be making one again someday :). Possibly part 2?

Thanks for reading!

E