We, like most people, have been stuck at home for weeks. I should be learning French and writing a full length play but that’s not happening.
However, we have become fascinated with making stop motion animation. There’s no rhyme or reason for this. We’ve never tried anything like it before so we’re starting from nothing.
It began as a joke. I’d been sending a daily photo to friends and family purporting to be the story of Morris, our new rescue penguin. In one part of the story Morris is kidnapped and a note has been received (yes, it is silly). One of the recipients asked for proof of life so I decided to animate some mock CCTV footage.
This required some research. There was zero budget and less expertise. I found out about Stop Motion Studio software which runs on an Android phone (did I mention we don’t have a camera?). This allowed us to create the first film.
And then the second.
After that we created a couple of fun shorts here, here, and here. Obviously I hadn’t quite managed focussing at this stage (or, indeed, at any stage so far).
Next we wanted to create something longer using lights (struggling with this as well). This is the Brian Sedge Masterclass. If you like Shakespeare… I’m sorry.
We returned to Morris’ story for our latest effort. It’s all got a bit out of hand. For this ‘production’ we had a screenplay, recorded a soundtrack separately using Audacity, used green screen (chroma key) to give us an exotic setting and used a video editor to mix it all together. It took several days before we found a piece of freeware that worked for us but we settled on Shotcut, which is idiosyncratic but does the job. The result is Egg, Morris’s origin story.
It’s been a steep and sometimes rocky learning curve but it has been fun.
Lance Woodman 