Tag Archives: stop motion

This music video was made with 700,000 Lite-Brite pegs in stop motion

Design, Music, Video, , , ,

Never heard of David Crowder Band?  That’s fine because the most interesting part of their new music video “SMS (Shine)” are the visuals.

The video portraying a love story made completely of LITE-BRITE pegs was done solely by hand. Even details such as the piano playing in the background and the monkeys beating a drum in perfect time was done free of digital affects and computer animation. It took 2,150 man hours, 1,200 LITE-BRITE images, 83 friends and 148 pizzas to complete the video.

Yeah.  Enjoy!

[Via Engadget]

Spinning lights atop a vinyl record player groove along with the Tron theme

Design, DIY, Music, Technology, Video, , , , , ,

In this time-lapse stop motion video, one Kim Pimmel managed to control a series of lights spinning on top of a vinyl record player to the fast-paced electro beat of the new Tron: Legacy theme.  Pimmel explains:

The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.  To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing [computer software].  The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.

Daft Punk would be proud.

[Via Gizmodo; Vimeo]

Teeny tiny Dot stars in the world’s smallest stop motion video

Design, Technology, Video, , , , , , ,

UK-based animators Aardman were recently entered into the Guinness Book of Records for creating the world’s smallest stop motion video.  Dot, a tiny 0.35 inch model figurine, struggles through a microscopic world made of fabric in this fun one minute thirty-seven second short film.  The video was shot using a Nokia N8, a smartphone that boasts a 12 megapixel camera and Carl Zeiss optics, attached to a CellScope microscope.  Yeah, this is technically a viral marketing stint by Nokia, but that does not take away the sheer magnitude of awesomeness surrounding this record-worthy feat.  Peek after the break to watch a making-of video.

[Via Gizmodo; TechRadar] Continue reading Teeny tiny Dot stars in the world’s smallest stop motion video →

Community is going animated for the Christmas special [Update: “Twittersode” to precede the premiere]

News, Television, , , , , , , ,

Series creator Dan Harmon is ready to take Community to a whole ‘nother level, quite literally in fact.  Season 2’s Chistmas episode is going to be entirely stop motion animated, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-style.  Earlier this summer Harmon shared his excitement over the possibily of making such a unique episode.  “It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do but, I never anticipated having the ability to do it,” he told NYMag.  “Jeff Gaspin at NBC woke up one morning and thought Community should do an animated episode.  I was like, ‘Well, that’s weird, because that’s the kind of stuff I’m usually suggesting and guys like him veto.”

Upon hearing news of the holiday surprise, a number of the cast members also couldn’t contain their enthusiasm for it.  “It is so hard for me not to tell everybody I know about it,” says Danny Pudi (Abed). “The minute we read that script, I was over-the-moon excited.  It’s like that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special that you see every Christmas. But in true Community fashion, it’s also a little subversive and a little dark.”  Alison Brie (Annie) said, “When I found out, I fell in love with the show all over again!”  Star Joel McHale (Jeff) revealed, “I can confirm that we are not yellow [ie. The Simpsons], and we do not have a talking dog [ie. Family Guy] in the episode.  But all your favorite Greendalians will be going animated.”

Can you imagine an animated Senor Chang and Starburns?  It’s going to be great.  In related news, you should know that Community also has planned a top-secret, big budget Halloween special featuring–you guessed it–zombies!  “Knowing too much about this particular plot would ruin it, but I promise it’s an awesome, one-off crazy conceptual episode with plot points and effects that are more familiar to horror film fans than our show’s fans,” says Harmon.

Community returns Thursday (9/23) at 8PM on NBC.

Update: Starting at 7PM ET (one hour prior to the season premiere) the main characters of the show will communicate with one another in a conversation using Twitter.  This “Twittersode” is being described as a “prequel” scene to the premiere ep.  According to EW,  “they’ll make arrangements for their first meet-up of the year, as well as preparations for their first class, Anthropology 101.”  A class we all know will be led by the one and only Betty White.  You have two options to watch the prequel convo go down: (1) Head over to www.nbc.com/CommunityTwittersode or (2) follow the Community gang on Twitter and watch it happen live in your Twitter feed.  Hop after the break to find all the characters’ Twitter handles.  (Mind you these are Twitter accounts for the fictional show characters, not the actual actors’ Twitter names.)  Happy tweeting!

[Via EW, here, here & here] Continue reading Community is going animated for the Christmas special [Update: “Twittersode” to precede the premiere] →

Light painting with an iPad creates awesome 3D visuals in space

Design, Technology, Video, , , , , , , ,

Light painting meets stop motion in this creative video designed by BERG and Denstsu London.  Using only a camera and multiple iPads, the team was able to capture illuminated 3D typography in real space.  I could blab about how they used multiple long exposures to create the awesome effect, but you should really just watch the video embedded above to see the final product and learn exactly how it was done.

[Via Engadget]

Human Pac-Man in stop motion makes me happy

EXPERIENCE, Video, , ,

111 human bodies over the course of four hours reenacted a game of Pac-Man moving around from seat to seat inside an auditorium.  Watch it because it will make you happy.  If the home-brewed sound effects don’t make you giggle like a little kid, there is something seriously wrong with you.  Now smash play!

Note: This video is one of five performance of the GAME OVER Project from the French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond.  Head over to the NotSoNoisy YouTube channel to watch more video game-inspired stop motion masterpieces.  Human Tetris, Space Invaders, and Pong await.

[Via likecool]

A walk across America in stop-motion

photography, Video, , , , ,

One Canon EOS 5D Mark II.  One tripod.  One tape measure.  One protractor.  A couple of friends.  That’s all you need to produce what you see above.  Conscious Minds Productions and director Sam Griffith hired a model and approached Levis (the jeans and clothing company) to pitch an idea to film a person walking across America in stop-motion.  Levis jumped on board and sponsored the shoot.  With over 1.4 million views to date, Levis made a great decision–it’s viral marketing at its finest!  Anyway.. the final product is quite impressive.  The video consists of 2,770 individual still frames, or photographs, bundled together.  The magic of stop-motion and time-lapse photography provide the awesome illusion of movement.  The 14-day shoot and the editing process that followed were extremely tedious and required much patience.  Due to the lack of expensive professional instruments, the team was forced to “MacGyver” their way through it all.  Producer Peter Cote: “We did not have any really expensive instruments to ensure really smooth orbital camera moves.  ‘I created a protractor in Photoshop printed it out and taped a piece of string to it.”  There was a fantastic behind-the-scenes video that accompanied this video on YouTube, but unfortunately it was taken down for some reason or other.  I will be sure to update this space if it pops up again.  Click here to view their their journey in Google Maps.  (Diggin’ the song?  It’s “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.)

[Via Planet5D; MailOnline]

Man animates fire at will

photography, Video,

Over the course of two weeks YouTuber brusspup utilized the power of stop-motion to create this fascinating fire animation.  Stop-motion involves snapping pictures at rapid rates to capture the illusion of movement; when the individual shots are placed together in post-editing they can be played in a continuous sequence, and this results in a video (of pictures).  I cannot imagine the amount of time and patience it took to make all this happen!

Stop-motion teardown of iPhone 4 proves it’s beautiful on the inside, too

photography, Technology, Video, , , , , ,

The fellas at TechRestore are back with a new teardown.  Yup, it’s the iPhone 4.

1784 hi-res photos combine to make a stop-motion expose of the iPhone 4, revealing every detail of construction, from packaging, down to the chips on the logic-board. Set to a custom electronic/glitch soundtrack, with fast paced action, this is no ordinary unboxing and take-apart video!

Well said.  Now watch.

[Via Gizmodo]

Wall-painted animation captures the Big Bang, our eventual demise, and everything in between

Art, EXPERIENCE, photography, Video, , , , ,

BIG BANG BIG BOOM: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end.

Produced by Blu.

This ten minute spectacle captures the birth of life on Earth, the slow but eventual rise to human species, and ends with an interesting twist on how everything might unravel.  How is something so intricate as wall-painted animation made, you ask?  The magic of stop-motion does the trick.  Street artist Blu would paint a sequence of images on a surface, take a picture of said images with a digital camera, paint new images onto the same (or new) surface, take pictures of those, and repeat.  After all the painting and photography was complete, he took the entire collection of images, laid them out side-by-side, and transformed it into a film.  Yes, this is an extremely tedious process; Blu admits this video took “months of work and hundreds [of] buckets of paint”.  The end result is nothing short of exquisite.

[Via NewScientist]