Stop-motion test from Josh Blacker on Vimeo.

With two weeks of leave getting underway, I thought I’d spend a good part of it trying out new things with my camera. Of course, I’m still hunting elephants here and there, but since they’re getting passé now, last night was my first attempt at a short stop-motion animation.

It’s entirely rough around the edges, for which I offer no apology. I wasn’t paying too much care as a) I wanted to get it done before my girlfriend got home and b) it was a test to see how well it would work. I put it together using iMovie (again, just testing!), which was a massive pain – there seems to be no way in the latest version of iMovie to import photos that aren’t in your iPhoto library. After a few fraught attempts resulting in a locked iPhoto library, I managed to just about get it done.

The individual frames are 0.2s each; rather than go for smooth 24fps motion (which would have required about 600 more shots!), I thought a slower framerate would preserve the ‘stop/go’ quality without ruining the action, which it just about does I think.

Anyway, I’ll be shooting another later this week, taking more time and care to get it right. Let me know what you think.