So, H.o.p. shot thousands of pics over the summer for uhm stop animation, and I say “Uhm, stop animation” because it all turned out to be slide shows, really. At spring’s end he had done, for a kid, this major opus of a stop animation. And then suddenly he went Lego crazy and after viewing a number of Lego animations he decided it had to be Legos, all Legos. And dragons. So for the rest of the summer it was almost all Legos and dragons. Which is fine. Except he refused to use the tripod and he did everything so fast, not near enough frames. Thousands of pics and not near enough frames for anything. He had all his stories plotted out in a major way and a number of scenes to each little video he had plotted. But there are just way too few frames.
I’d upload his pics and then put them in Quicktime at 6 frames per second and he’d say, “Uh, it’s not supposed to look like that. It’s too fast.”
I would put them in Quicktime at 2 frames per second and he’d say, “Uh, it’s not supposed to look like that. It’s too slow and jerky.”
I’d tell him, “You need to shoot more frames.”
“It’s all right. It’s all part of learning,” he’d say.
“Yes, it’s all right. It’s all part of learning,” I’d say.
Then he’d go back and do another 350 shots of another elaborate story and still not near enough frames. Repeat of the above discussion. And H.o.p. would run off vowing to take more pics. He would come running over to me many times and have me look at sequences of pics he’d taken and he’d say, “Is that enough pics yet?” and I’d say, “No, sorry, honey, it’s not enough pics yet. You need to take more pics. It’s not going to be like you want it to be.”
“It’s all part of learning!” H.o.p. would say, running off to shoot more pics.
He had a lot of fun doing it, too.
All last winter he had worked on small onion-skin style animations and with those he had started to get it, the idea of more frames needed, need more frames. But it wasn’t happening with the Lego stuff. he worked too on several clay stop animations but he keeped seeming to short out on them and returned to the Legos. He kept saying he had to finish the clay ones, that he wasn’t done with them, while he contined with the Legos. All summer long every flat surface in the apartment was filled with clay animation things he had begun work on but hadn’t finished and Lego animations that were ongoing.
I’ve got thousands of pics still sitting on my computer from this summer. I have tried going through them with him and putting together movies from them with him. Tried periodically throughout the summer. I thought it needed to be done with all of them because these were things in his head, things he really wanted to do, he put a lot of work into them. And I thought it would teach him something too, that the more he worked with the actual pics, putting them together in Quicktime, the more he’d start to get it that he needed more frames, he needed to slow down. He knew they were not what he wants and he’d start working on one, get into it a couple of scenes, then decide it’s not worth finishing and run off to start on something else. We have managed to put together several “animations” but they’re really for his own edifictaion and are more slide shows than anything else.
The one below is from the middle of the summer.
The Plot of The Boogie Man Monster
“The Boogie Man Monster” involves a couple of warriors going through dangerous water, going to a castle, meeting the Boogie Man Monster, something about a spaceship getting eaten by a space monster (don’t know how we got into outer space, but he used a plastic Apollo rocket toy given him by a cousin for that), in the meanwhile a flashback scene, they escape from the Boogie Man Monster but then it reappears and is chased back to its dangerous water lair.
This has a couple of fun things in it. I like how he did the Lego men going through the water at the beginning and end. I love that he incorporated a flashback! He shot it linearly so it’s straight out of the camera except he wanted a neon filter effect from Photoshop to add to the sense of the mysterious. Oh, and the titles, those were Photoshop.
I’ll follow this up with one he did this week. Very different. Much shorter. And I thnk it’s hysterical. Not Lego.
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