Today’s ds106 Daily Create was another video one, these are the kind that make the weak run for the hills crying “Mommy! Video is so complicated…”
Make a stop motion movie that brings something to life in a unique way.
I actually may have never done a stop motion video before, so that’s why I like the challenge. For today’s, I used the subject that has dominate my flickr stream the last few weeks, sunflowers. They are starting to wear out and hang their heads low, so I planned to try and document one losing its petals.
I found a shorter one that could get in my camera frame a flower and a rock for the petals to fall onto. I set my Canon 7D on a tripod, and used the remote control to take photos. After each photo I would remove one petal and drop it on the ground, so the sequence would show one flower losing its petals, and eventually the entire flower head.
It moves around a lot (from the motion me tearing off petals), and the exposure varied as the sun overhead was going in and out of clouds– but to me it has that jerky motion of stop motion animation.
To make the video, I imported all the images into iMovie. I had to select all, then set the cropping to “Fit” so the full image you show, and reduced the duration of each to 0.2 seconds to make the sequence go fast. It worked, but of course, was short, so I repeated it about 5 times, inserted a black frame between, and made it end on a Ken jones pan from flower to petals on rock.
To make it complete, I searched ccMixter on the word “Falling” and ended up on a nice bluesy song with a sultry vocal
Falling by unreal_dm is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0).
One can theorize what this might mean- a life cycle, loss, falling as a verb or as an emotion… It’s just a video!
Oh my, July is almost over. What should you do? Start doing Daily Creates now. Make your own challenge for a week, for August, for 2013… Sergeant Hulka might call you out to do a long set of pushups..
I love this. It is sexy with music. For a try I turned the music down and all gets a playful beauty and completely different meaning. I liked it with and without music.