our first assignment for experimental animation was to be either a silhouette or hand-drawn animation. i decided to go with silhouettes, but in the end it’s become more of a stop-motion piece, since my makeshift studio wasn’t capable of backlighting.

captured using FrameThief, soundtracked in Live, cropped and stretched in Motion.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.
(try watching with headphones on - the bouncing sounds pan left to right as the balls move across the screen..)

it’s interesting using a hands-on medium after a couple of years of mostly digital work. i had thought it would be fairly time consuming, although once i got it going it was surprisingly quick, and while it could have been put together in flash using a bit of scripting, it’s hard to beat that nice old school aesthetic of a stop frame animation. i’m hoping to do a bit more of this type of stuff over the next couple of months and develop it a little further - i was chopping a few bits and pieces up in Motion afterwards, and the stop-frame style lends itself quite nicely to some really interesting effects.