Stop motion tests

I never thought I would get into this... but i've become obsessed with stop motion animation.

My wife and I have been commissioned to make a short stop motion film for an upcoming project which will remain nameless for copyright reasons... but I thought I would share my first attempts at this new craft. 

this one was my first try. I just wanted to do a quick test to see if I could actually do it. I found an old robot sculpture I made like 8 years ago that had wire arms I could pose. i dusted off my old DV camera (used only once) and downloaded a free iStopMotion software trial. the lighting is quite bad and I had no real purpose other than to make it move... so don't judge me too harshly.

this next one I actually tried to create better lighting and used my wife's Canon digital camera. I downloaded a trial of Dragon, a great little stop motion program developed by the guys who made the United Airlines Dragon commercial (yes it was all stop motion), it can control a digital camera so the resolution of the frames is much much higher than using a stinky old DV cam.. plus its reasonably priced at around 250 bucks.

 I used an old plush doll my wife made a long time ago that she didn't care about.. stuck in some 20 gauge steel wire from home depot (which i do not recommend since it is too springy and does not hold its position well). I tried attaching the feet to the table using magnets... but i found that even though i used  super strong rare earth magnets, which you can barely pry apart, it still was not strong enough for balancing at precarious angles. So for the short I will be using bolt and screw tie-downs. 

 So I made it move... again with no purpose other than to test my own ability to make the thing move. (the table kept moving and i wasn't concentrating on it very much... so it's not my best effort).

my dad and I are working on a proper steel armature with ball joints that will give me the ability to do much more subtle movements and be much sturdier, you can buy armature sets online.. but they are pretty expensive, luckily my dad has a workshop and knows all about metal parts, so we are making our own from scratch. i'll post pictures of it later.