Well it seemed like the biggest part of this project was figuring out what to do it on! My brother Ian and I decided to partner up for this project and our original idea was to make a short “Indiana Jones” style film but we eventually came to the realization that that would require more work than what we really had time for so then we started thinking of ways in which we could make a documentary about the Blue River Mining District where we like to go explore quite a bit. When we had finally decided that we would go with this idea, the snow came in and prevented us from being able to get up there to film so we had to scrap that idea.

It was starting to get down to the wire and neither of us could come up with many good ideas, but I went back and watched some of the projects from past terms and saw one that used animation that was a lot like “Stop Motion”. I had worked a little with Stop Motion animation back in high school and had fun with it, so I started thinking of  a way we could make a story and utilize this effect.

After my brother and I sitting down and having a LOT of discussion we came up with a funny idea. Our Aunt Lisa lives next door to us and had planned on doing some yard work last weekend so we decided we would help her with it if she acted in our film. And that is how our final product came about

I took on the role of filming most of the footage for the video and Ian worked on the editing. The filming part was kind of a disappointment because the video camera I planned on using did not work so we ended up shooting with a digital camera and the quality was not as good as I would have liked it to be. The editing process was actually the easiest part of the project. The Stop Motion animation is basically just a collection of still images taken from the video footage and put in line back to back to create sort of a “flip book” effect. It is kind of a challenge in the filming stage because there has to be a person that steps into the frame and moves the object that the stop motion effect is applied to slightly and then walk out and back in again to move it a little more and a little more until the object is where you want it to end. In the editing stage, you then take a snapshot of every moment in which the object has advanced and the person moving it is off screen.

I had fun working on this project with my brother and aunt. And I am pleased with how it turned out.

Hope you all enjoy!