For a while now, I've been wanting to create a stop motion animation. Making a video for the fun of it with no purpose other than just to make a video is fine. However, many times an inspiration or motivation is needed to jump start creativity.
I've been blessed with two good friends who celebrated their two year wedding anniversary. As a demonstration of my gratitude toward them, I decided to put together a short stop motion animation for their enjoyment. A lot of my inspiration and learning came from a super cool pair of YouTubers called The Fu. You can checkout them out at their channel.
--> The Fu <--
One of the biggest challenges I faced was picking the right song. Knowing both friends are heavily music minded people, I really took my time searching. After watching tons and tons of stop motion videos on YouTube, I decided to go with a folkish sounding song. By shear randomness, a Honda advertisement popped up during one of the videos I watched. Long story short, the ad was promoting a group called Monster Calling Home. Checkout the story behind the group here: Surprising Monsters Calling Home Their song, Fight to Keep, caught my attention. Once I heard this song and saw the music video and story behind it, I knew I had to use it. So after a couple of days searching for the right song, I purchased Fight to Keep. Get your own copy here. -->Fight to Keep <--
The more planning you put into a stop motion animation, the easier its going to be. Part of my planning phase included:
breaking the song lyrics into different segments
calculating how many frames are in each segment
story boarding how each scene will look for each segment
After all the planning was done, I procrastinated a few weeks, but finally made myself get the 125+ still images I needed to complete the project. To take the pictures I used an affordable point and shoot camera because I wanted to show that a fancy DSLR camera isn't needed to make a nice looking video. Once I uploaded all the shots onto my computer, editing everything together onto the timeline in Final Cut was simple. I got most of it all done just before I had to go to my churches weekly prayer meeting.
All in all, it was definitely a fun project to do, and I really enjoyed showing the final result to my dear friends. I was actually very nervous while I was showing the video. Its been a long time since I've been nervous like that. Its always nerve wrecking not knowing how your art will be accepted. SDG
