Stop Motion Animation

Kina Grannis' first album, Stairwells, came out in 2010, and though she's not quite on the popularity level of A-list artists like Justin Timberlake, her YouTube channel has over 830,000 subscribers and her next album is due out this May. Kina is known for her YouTube covers, her beautiful original music, and her unique and creative videos. One of her most well-known videos is a music video for her original song, "In Your Arms," with over 10.2 millions views since it's release in November of 2011. Here's the music video:

This music video is far from ordinary. It was made using stop motion animation, a very detail-oriented and time-consuming method of animation, but one with an amazing result when executed well. In stop motion animation, objects that appear to move on their own are actually physically manipulated, placed frame by frame and photographed. The photographs are then made into a video, and it appears that these objects are moving fluidly and by themselves.

Kina Grannis and Greg Jardin, the director of the "In Your Arms" music video, took stop motion animation a step further and used jelly bean art. There are entire paintings made out of jelly beans that look incredibly accurate and interesting.

In the "In Your Arms" video, each and every frame was made of jelly beans, individually and precisely placed, to create the scenes you see her in during the video. Once the jelly beans were perfectly placed, a sheet of glass was placed over the box they were in and Kina lied on top of it, maneuvering herself into whatever position the director told her she was in in that exact frame, and then a picture was taken and the process began again. Each frame could take several hours, and there were approximately 2300 frames to shoot, so the video, in its entirety, took over a year to shoot. The end result was worth it, and as such a young and new artist, she created one of the most unique and interesting music videos the world has ever seen.

The "Making of..." video shows just how they went about making this video and how much and how many people went into it. 

Fantastic Mr Fox

Fantastic Mr Fox is by far one of my favorite animated films of all time. Not only is the stop motion incredible, the story is entertaining and witty. There are so many quick and sassy lines that could go unnoticed if one wasn't paying attention but they're all ones you don't want to miss. I love how instead of cursing they replace each "bad word" with the word "cuss" I think it adds a bit of a "choose your own adventure" type of a feel. You can replace the word cuss with whatever you want to in your mind. Here! Give it a shot! It's pretty fun!

I appreciate that the detail they put into each line of dialogue as well as every movement we see on screne. This film blows me away each time I watch it. It will always have a special place in my heart.

Darkness Light Darkness

Darkness Light Darkness is a short film by Jan Švankmajer. I think it is a very interesting film that sheds light on human life. Jan works with clay figures throughout the short. Human limbs (clay limbs) try to put themselves together. Strange sounds are used during this process. Hands, ears, eyes, a face, and all of the other limbs eventually come together to create a fully-grown human body trapped in a small room where they're connected.

I found this film to be very impressive and well done because it is stop motion animation. It is such a meticulous way of creating a story. You have to change the models slightly every frame without losing the continuity or the persistence of vision. You take a picture and change it again and again until the film is complete.

I don't know exactly what Jan was trying to portray with this film. I think there are a lot of messages that can be taken from it. However, I can only put one message I received into words clearly. This message is: We (humans) try so hard to discovery our meaning or purpose in life but we get so caught up in the search that we never get a chance to truly live. We have to look outside of the tiny room (narrow perspective) we think were trapped in to see the wonder of life. When each of us are open and truly alive, that is when we will be living out our purpose. I could be completely wrong but that's the great part about films. Each viewer can get something different out of a single film.

The video below is the full short film. Viewer Discretion Is Advised

stop motion

was up late and ran across this. By far the best most creative stop motion video i've ever seen. The use of google street view to take us on a journey was beyond clever. I can't imagine how many painstaking hours this took to make.

Address Is Approximate from The Theory on Vimeo.

Making of Nightmare Before Christmas

First of all Tim Burton looks so YOUNG in these videos.
I just have loved the Nightmare Before Christmas since I was a child. It has always been so magical to me and watching these videos now only further solidifies the magic of this movie. Everyone on Tim's team is just genius and quite frankly the whole idea of stopmotion animation is mind boggling to me. I have no idea how these people make these masterpieces in a mere 3 years i feel like it would take me at least 10 to make something of that scale. There isnt much to say these videos kind of leave you speechless on the entire process. So check them out!

Growing A ToonLoop Animation

In answer to Nick's slip-n-slide posting, here is the one I came up with in class. ToonLoop was a pleasure to use because of its simplicity. Since I am interested in heuristic learning, it makes sense to me that now that I have been able to produce something that I had fun with on my first pass, I am that much more motivated to try another more involved stop motion project. If I had hit a technological wall or steep learning curve the first time, that impression might have colored my idea of stop motion animation forever after. Thank you to the ToonLoop programmers for understanding that sometimes less is more.