test run for an upcoming animation piece. check the vimeo for the HD version.

this is the version of paint that i screened in experimental animation on wednesday. it’s a bit different from the first cut i put up here (mostly utilizing the textures of the paint rather than the motion of the strokes), but i’m quite happy with how it looks. full credit to squid for coming up with the idea of painting (i was originally going to rotoscope footage of jack, brooke and i dancing like idiots) and for encouraging me to try something i wasn’t familiar with. this is definitely something i want to investigate further.

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i’ve disabled streaming on this one because the h264 compression didn’t like it very much and i had to bump the bitrate up to 1500k/s, so you’ll have to wait for it to load fully first.
otherwise, you can hit the little arrow button to download the clip or just click here.

sometimes it’s nice to get your hands dirty.

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first draft. finished product by wednesday.

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.

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(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.