43 days of Mike

Last summer when I purchased my new Mac book pro I decided to experiment with the Photo booth application. I decided to take a picture everyday to see how I changed over time. Originally I had planned to do this for a lot longer but due to studying at university I missed several days then felt it wouldn't work. I managed to do 43 days in a row and recently decided to put the pictures together in Final Cut Pro. Here is the video:

First experience with Stop-Motion

I have always had an interest in art and multimedia from as long as I can rememeber so when I found out the first piece of work I would be experimenting with was stop motion, I was delighted. Although I have never done stop motion myself before I have always had an interest in it and could not wait to give it a go.

Stop motion is an animation technique used to manipulate objects and take photographs frame by frame to give an object the effect that it is moving. Its had a long history in film and was one of the very early techniques for animation as it was even used in the original Star Wars films in a few scenes.

When I was younger , as many kids did I had a lot of toys and action figures. I can remember looking on the internet for stop motion videos or slideshows and this has kept with me ever since. Even to this day they intrigue me. This is one of the better and more recent videos I have watched.

In this small project we done, we didn’t use objects or action figures. We used a slightly different technique using a whiteboard and a marker pen. This is a great way of doing stop motion and lets you pretty much create any story you want.  We were put into groups of 4 and given a whiteboard, a marker pen and a digital camera.  We had to take two images of each picture we drew, and in total around 110 images to amount to a 10 second stop motion clip. Admittedly I haven’t done any group work in a creative subject since AS media or my Art GCSE so I wasn’t really used to working in groups. On the other hand it was a great way to get to know people and also combine are ideas and are multimedia skills. These factors combined resulted in some pretty interesting ideas. This is an example of whiteboard stop motion.

We were given the task of getting a box on one side of the board to the other, over what seemed to look like a house. This gave us a plenty of room for imagination and the ideas of birds, monsters and all sorts come flooding in. I am fairly happy with our final outcome however I definitely feel it could have been better. I think as it was our first piece of work and we were inexperienced it was more a bout getting a grasp on the medium and sharing our creative ideas. We were also restricted to a time limit. I believe if I where to do this again I would have a much better idea on what to do and be able to come up with a better end product. Here is the final video of what my group and the rest of the class created.