Ever since I saw “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” as a child, I have been fascinated by 3-D stop-motion animation. For me, this medium has a magical quality, because it resides somewhere between the harsh (and sometimes boring) world of live action and the softened fantasy (and similarly boring) world of cartoon animation. Almost anything can be portrayed through stop-motion (if you are willing to spend the inordinate amount of time to achieve the smallest movement or effect) and the kicker is, it ends up looking real. As a child, I wanted to see something that was fun and engaging while looking real and these movies (especially “Rudolph”) looked like my favorite stuffed animals had come to life and were entertaining me. Traditional cartoon animation is similarly fascinating (and involves the same basic principles), but it just does not have that same element of reality to it. Drawings are simply too two-dimensional for any sort of visual realism to be achieved (even for a child viewer). Stop-motion uses three-dimensional objects and a massive number of still frame photographs to portray fluid movement. The more photographs shown per second, the more realistic the movement looks.

"Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” believe it or not, was made in 1964. And this was by no means one of the first large scale stop-motion animated films—Russia was doing it decades earlier than us!

"The Nightmare Before Christmas” was made in 1993 and shows marked improvement from Rudolph, and yet there still was not much digital influence to alter the effects of what was achieved by man power alone.

For my stop motion project I decided to start off simply. I was rooting around in my mother’s closet over Thanksgiving Break and came across my old Lite-Brite. I wanted to get a feel for how a homemade stop-motion would look and so I took the easy route and used a mapped out picture of a steam boat and started plugging away and snapping pictures after every Lite-Brite peg was inserted. Needless to say, this was tedious. I believe the final count was somewhere near 300 photographs (all on my dad’s digital camera mind you) and I ended up running out of white pegs. Surprisingly the set up was extremely easy, as long as you have a tripod and patience, and it ended up only taking about 45 minutes. I then uploaded the photos into Adobe and found the handy “create a flipbook” feature and set it to 10 frames per second. It looked pretty good and was a whole 30 seconds long!
I wanted to amp up my project (I would feel pretty silly having the class watch a Lite-Brite for 30 seconds and then saying “Ta-da!”) so I went over to my friend’s house and decided to shoot a little pool. It was interesting working with larger objects on a larger field and not really knowing when to take the pictures. I knew that the smaller the increments of movements and the more pictures would lead to a more polished and fluid video but I kind of like the sometimes abrupt jerkiness of stop-motion and to be honest my friend was getting a bit bored and antsy to have her pool table back. I think the pool segment turned out pretty well and even though I would have liked to have expanded it, it was about 700 photos.
Now the trouble was in how I was going to tie together a Lite-Brite steamboat and a crazy pool game. I knew that I wanted to do a little bit of cell animation (you know, like the cartoons) but I was way out of my depth on how to make images appear to be in motion. So instead, I animated my drawing process to make a nifty title. That wasn’t so bad, I just had to draw out how I wanted the title to look finished and then I traced a little bit at a time in between photos. It actually ended up looking smoother and cooler than I had anticipated (even if it was just as completely random as my other two segments and didn’t really succeed in tying anything together). I knew I had to get the pieces edited together and have interesting background music, and this is really where I had the most trouble. I finally found the song “Dramamine” by Modest Mouse and it was just perfect. It had the right sort of beat to go with the movement and it just so happened to be about a motion sickness drug (quite ironic when paired with a stop motion film). Anyway, enough rambling. Please enjoy my film!

Melissa's Stop Motion from Melissa Stevenson on Vimeo.