Working with Nakyung, I created two gifs using stop motion animation. We took inspiration from origami animations like this one, where paper could transform instantly in playful and creative ways.
Before explaining our process, here’s our final products:
We started with the concept of transforming paper, but it was hard to verbally communicate our specific ideas to each other. So we started drawing a simple storyboard on paper; here’s our storyboard for the first gif we made with the hearts.
The next challenge was to figure out our setup. Nakyung had a GoPro set that could hold our phones, which was really useful. We knew we wanted a white background, so we taped two sheets to a moveable whiteboard to create our backdrop. We then positioned the phone so it got the full width of the paper in frame.
We used construction paper to cut out different shapes like pumpkins and hearts. For the skeleton arm, we taped a hand I had gotten for my Physical Computing midterm to a ruler and wrapped it in paper for a cool, mummified look.
Finally, it was time to put everything together! We don’t have a lot of pictures from this process because it truly took all four of our hands to keep everything moving. StopMotionStudio was a really intuitive and easy app to use, and I was surprised how well the gifs turned out when we played them back for the first time. Incorporating our own bodies definitely made things a little harder, since limbs get tired easily (Nakyung’s arm was dying at the end of the hearts gif). But overall I think the effect was worth it; adding humans to our gifs gave them a more personal touch.
I think another way to reduce the workload on us would be to have placed the paper on the table and move items across a flat horizontal surface. Letting gravity do most of the work would have been nice, but ultimately I don’t think the GoPro setup we used would have been compatible. Overall, I’m happy with how our animations came out! It was a really great learning experience into an art form I don’t know much about.
Appendix: the video files before cropping and converting to gif