August's Animation
Oh, August. You HOT, HOT sun of a month.
Now don't get me wrong... The height of summer is pretty great- but if you're a gardener like me, and it doesn't rain for days, you start to worry.
And then when it finally does, there's a giant sigh of relief.
For August's animation, I knew I wanted to animated things from a different angle.
I looked into ordering a rostrum tripod online, but after doing a bit of research, I figured it would be pretty easy to make one. Luckily I had all the materials I needed lying around in the shed. Two 2x1's, some wood screws, and a side table I didn't really use.
You can find all sorts of plans on how to make one online, but it's really quite basic. I measured the height of the shot and focus range I needed, proceeded to drill some holes!
A sturdy enough rostrum...
For all those downward shots!
I've been thinking about animating beans for a long time. Once you realize you can animate just about anything, you really start to look at things differently.
We have a large selection of dried beans basically staring at me on a shelf in our kitchen and it just became clear- BEANS! I then started to look into bean mosaics (which are totally awesome), but didn't really know what my story was going to be about.
I wanted to achieve brighter colours, that's for sure. Thanks to Pinterest, I learned that you can do just that by placing navy beans (or any other white beans) in a ziplock bag with food colouring.
Of course, it's always good to let them dry before you start to play.
I really felt like a kid doing this. Completely satisfying.
I laid all the colours I had and it came to me!
The sun, the clouds, the drought, the rain... oh August.
We finally got that sigh of relief mid-month. This animation depicts the story of the drought we experienced.
I recorded a "Stranger Things" inspired arpeggiated track on my synthesizer to accompany some freesound.org sound effects (thank you!) and there you have it. 17 seconds of beans.
This animation was shot at 15fps, using a Canon Rebel T3i, and 40mm lens on istopmotion. It took a total of 9 hours.
