C H E Q U A M E G O N B O L L I N G E R
Unit 3 - Catherine Stop Motion
I chose to pay tribute to one of
the most powerful women in history, Catherine the Great. Born as Sophia Augusta Fredericka in Stettin,
Pomerania to a ruling German family. She was a pauper princess who was groomed
to marry her second cousin to unite Russia and Germany. Her fate was decided as
a child but through discipline, patience, and intelligence she manifested her
own destiny. Her policy, ideas, and persona gave the Russian people their
Golden Age. Her rule from July
19th, 1762 – November 17th, 1796 was an incredible
example of cultural enlightenment. This animation is meant to bring her into
our present day by creating a portrait in a new drawing medium. The music was
written by Vasily Pashkevich and was
commissioned by Catherine for the first Opera at the Hermitage Opera Theatre. The
frame I chose references a keepsake trophy portrait, these were very popular
during Catherine’s rule. She would give her closest friends and lovers a small
portrait of herself for safekeeping.
My stop motion film uses
hair as a medium to create line, shape, and form in the animation. I shot the footage three times to troubleshoot
the process. After working with glass as a drawing surface I moved on to
plexi-glass painted matte white. This reduced the shadows and gave my camera
the ability to focus. To create the fluidity needed to draw with the hair, I
used coconut oil. This oil is translucent when heated to the right temperature.
Using my fingers and a paintbrush I was able to move the hair over the drawing
surface as desired. This is a technique I look forward to developing for future
projects.
Teresa Shannon
My stop motion project is based on the concept of an automatic coffee maker. Each morning my boyfriend wakes up before me and makes me coffee and I thought it would be funny if I showed the coffee making itself and him taking the credit for it. My initial idea involved giving the coffee pot eyes and movable hand but this became a huge challenge. So I scrapped the idea and went with the idea that the kitchen appliances were working together.
I used Premiere, and Photoshop to create the video. Photoshop was helpful in creating the introduction scene with the title and animating the coffee press drawing to pull in the first shot in the stop motion video. I also used Photoshop to remove my hand in some places and add comment bubbles. So far I think this was my favorite project. We had so much fun creating it!
With audio :)
Kristina Ricci
For my stop motion animation I choose to use objects that
were readily available to me which were tools.
It took me almost 3 hours to take all the tools down and then back up
again. My goal was to make the tool room
look like it was doing an unusual magical dance. To begin and end the dance I added a curtain,
which I brought into Photoshop and had to figure out how to manipulate it in
layers so I could only move one portion of it in each frame. I then played with the effects available in
premier, changing the color and adding boarders. I reversed some groupings of frames to make
the tools look like they were dancing and changed the speed of some frames.
I struggled with this assignment because working with such a
large amount of pictures made editing them all at once difficult. When I did the paste attributes technique of
applying the same effects to all the frames, it ended up layering unwanted
effects, which I had to go through individually to delete. Adding the curtain was a good way for me to
practice how to use Photoshop and animate digitally but it didn’t turn out how
I had imagined it. In between this
project I was getting frustrated so I did a practice animation where I took a
picture of a camel, brought it into illustrator and image traced it to look
like a cartoon. I then took it into Photoshop
and started moving the legs frame by frame.
If I were to do this again I would avoid using pictures and just work
directly in illustrator.
Tess McDonald
Tess McDonald
Krystal Aguilar
"We Are What We See"
"Mirror, mirror, on the wall..." what do I constantly look at?
What if in a surreal world we actually became what we watched, how cute but creepy that would be if it was an animated princess movie, right? Where it is the norm as a young girl to watch these delightful films it inebriates our mind subconsciously to many skewed ideas of what love is. Although it isn't quite we are what we watch, WWW4, it is "We Are What We See." This stop-motion animated film is a fairytale story that illustrates that our interaction through technology and media that we choose to watch, becomes like a transformative portal, shaping our minds and potentially our being. I used transitions, items shown in the Snow White movie, and used effects to give more of an animated likeness to the stop motion.
The story (framed in a black vignette) starts with the words "Once upon a tiME," (there is an emphasis on the individual identity) followed by "We are What We See." The apple and the snake-like ribbon refers to biblical scripture of temptation alluding to the temptation to watch what is not good or to naively see the good but in reality being deceived. Dirt was placed over the word "See" also alluding to "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," we ultimately will die and we die do to the sin we commit; however, sunglasses are put over the dirt since we try to hide from others and be in denial to ourselves, reassuring ourselves that there is nothing wrong in what we choose to do and we are "good people." Then the story continues. A girl is watching Snow White getting sleepy and so she becomes sleepy on her bed with a mirror on the wall. YOu may catch that the seven dwarves are watching her at a point in time. She sleeps and wakes to find herself as Snow White and watching a girl become sleepy. She is horrified at what has happened. You may feel a bit disturbed along with the music. It ends with identity or the hand being wiped away. The story ends in blackness.
[See Internet Research in October titled Krystal Aguilar Week 10 Museum of Moving Image to see the ideation and process for this final stop motion animation product. The themes of identity, surrealism, transforming, costume and reflection intrigued me.]
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