Most of the time I literally feel worthless. I also feel I’ve lost all motivation to improve, learn and challenge myself and be “creative”. I feel so stunted and drained at the moment. Sometimes, it’s just easier to live in some “safe” lull where I just watch endless amounts of TV and I end up just feeling incredibly resentful towards myself. I really want to stop this but it’s strangely difficult to do. I’m working on this but part of me thinks I might need to get some help.
Lately, to keep myself sane and make myself feel better, I’ve been fiddling with some stop motion video. I’ve made stop motion a few times before, but each time has been really jittery. I was thinking about what I could do to create a short video of smooth stop motion. It dawned on me that there are 24 frames in 1 second of footage, which means I would probably need 24 images to create one “smooth” second of footage.
I decided to test this out using origami as my focus. I wanted make it look like a piece of paper was folding itself into a paper crane. Great idea, right? Well, not really. This was my first attempt.
My first mistake was using a rather unreliably tripod. I bought one of those bendy tripods and thought I’d use it for this experiment. The tripod wasn’t strong enough to hold up my camera so whenever I went to take a photo, it moved slightly.
Another issue was the paper I used to make this paper crane was way too big for my first attempt at 24-images-per-second stop motion experimentation. It took me a good two hours to fold a piece of paper in half. I grew frustrated and quickly made the paper crane. The bit with the paper crane moving around was done as an after thought and I think it was the best part of the video because it looks kinda cool. Score.
For the next video, I was determined to make a full paper crane. I think this is my favourite video so far because it does look kinda cool.
This time I used smaller origami paper. This also took ages to do and I grew frustrated by the end of it, which you can tell by the hurried-ness of the end of the video.
Last night I made another video, this time using my Victoria Beckham barbie as my subject. I wanted to see if I could create smooth movement with a doll. I wanted make her walk, turn her head and wave.
I think this video is all together very rushed. I probably should have spaced out her movements better in order to make it seem less rushed and jittery. What was difficult this time around was the movements are really hard to measure out. Normally with paper, you just fold bit by bit. With a doll, making her walk bit by bit is really difficult and so that’s probably why it looks so rushed and blurry.
I’ve actually made another video focussing on the walking. I think walking is hard to appear natural because you have to also take into account the weight that’s placed on each foot as you walk. I’ve tried to do it in this new video but it’s still not very good.
I think for my next video, I might bring in another Barbie doll and actually try to not only piece together smooth movement, but incorporate pans and actually cut together a bit of a story. Hopefully that will help me create a video that’s longer than 8 seconds!
