https://vimeo.com/89078231

A couple of years ago, I used to have an obsession with Lego. I’m not ashamed of playing with Lego as an adult, why should I be? I had heaps of those Ninjago Lego, I gave them away when I realised that my shelve could not fit anymore Lego let alone my MicroMachine cars.

Unlike my previous video titled “Hunter”, this new “Hunted” video is a stop-motion. There’s a total of 14 images that make up the short video, there is no audio. I haven’t made a stop-motion short film for some time now, since Year 10, gosh I sound so old. Back in the day, I used to play around with play dough and plasticine – aahhhhhh the good old days – creating weird looking figurines for my final assessment. I truly believe that my Year 10 stop-motion animation was one of my best work I’ve done thus far but then again, I had nothing to compare it to until now.

Upon watching Hunted, you may conclude that there are visible errors in the production aspect of video. I had cropped each picture individually to rid the image of the shadows of my hands and camera phone – I use my iPhone 5 to capture these images – cropping the images meant that the ratio of each photo is just ridiculously a pain to look at in the video.

Using ‘found’ materials around the environment that I was in – that is, my study room – I used my lot of blank artist trading cards, blu tack, sticky tape, a pair of scissors, one of my Lego figurines in my attempt to create a scene. I used a table lamp to light up my scene, I also used a translucent A5 box file with a zip case and a blue translucent file case as my gels for my lamp light, yes, that’s correct, I’m a student on a mere budget, keeping production cost down since ’09! It worked, well… Sort of. My make shift gels worked like a charm.

There are a few photos that do not match the ambience of the other pictures. Not having a tripod was one of the disadvantages I had. I used the software program Final Cut Pro X to edit my short clip, adjusting each image to last 0.12 seconds in duration, I did not edit the pictures other than cropping it.

Overall, I am relatively happy with the product that I managed to create within an afternoon. Of course, there needs to be improvements in the future if I aim to make another stop-motion later in the semester, I think next time I will use my DSLR and a tripod to shoot my images. I truly did enjoyed making the clip.

(This video is about light).