Sto-Mo

So here’s our first test of stop-motion animation with LEGOs. My son and I have grand plans to create our own alternate storylines. But given the difficulty in creating even this C-grade animation we may be scaling back our vision. Still, this is really fun.

Couple things:

• Lighting is the hardest part. LEGOs are shiny. Really need a diffuse light tent.
• Timing is the second hardest part. You can calculate shots per second, of course. But even then you have to be constantly doing math for dramatic pauses and such.
• iStopMotion is an invaluable app if you are interested in this sort of thing. Easy enough to do with a regular digital camera, but iStopMotion lets you use an iSight and leaves the last frame semi-transparent on the screen so you can see what you are trying to line up with.
• That’s a half-destroyed Hutt sail barge in the background.
• Shout out to Wilhelm.

The inspiration for this little family project was my son coming across the hardcopy of a flipbook animation I mentioned in this post years ago.