Small Calamities

Your Calamities

One Million Years B.C.
July 4, 2006 | permalink

I made a stop motion claymation short when I was in the fourth grade. It was about dinosaurs. Specifically, I wanted to show the relationship between the different tiers of the food chain. Not that I was able to express it like that when I was nine, but the concept was there. My film opened with an egg, out of which a small brontosaurus hatched. It shambled over to some green construction paper grass and started munching. A clever use of cottonballs as a dissolve to show the passage of time later, and we see the brontosaurus, now fully grown, munching away on yet more grass.

Cue the predator! A tyrannasaurus stalks into the frame, and after a very one sided battle, begins munching on the now dead herbivore. After eating his fill, the tyrannosaur walks off, and the carcass quickly decomposes, with new grass sprouting from its remains.

I did the whole thing myself- the story, the sets, the lights, the sculpting and animation. The only things I let anyone else do were modify the camera to shoot frame by frame and develop the film. I was immensly proud of my accomplishment. Actually, truth be told, I still am. I never made another- not long after my parents split up and we started moving around, and blah blah blah (is that an old story or what?)

I mention this now because I have often thought about my little short, and about trying my hand at another. The other day on Boing Boing they ran a bit about Between You and Me, a film strung together from still images from a digital camera. I feel like an idiot for not putting it together that I have had all of the equipment I need to make a stop-motion film for years. Doh!

I made a little test film last night; nothing complicated, just a few frames of a guitar pick crawling across the coffee table, to see what it would take to animate something. It was so cool. I can't wait to try something a little more ambitious.