methodology stop motion

It's the big debut! My first attempt at stop motion is now ready for viewers. (You can view it larger on vimeo.)I created this to compliment the poster I designed for my senior show theme, which became a promotion piece. It's an animated journey through the creative process via paper cut outs and frame by frame animation.
I spent a weekend printing and cutting out all the little pieces and then signed up to use the lighting studio. They have this great contraption that is made for documenting 2D work and allows you to attach the camera facing down and has even lighting. My friend/roommate Amy Miller volunteered to help and so on a Tuesday night we went to work. As I mentioned before, this was my first attempt at creating a stop motion and I learned a hell of a lot from the process, for example:

• Determine early on how long you want your animation to be and how many frames equal one second (I originally shot for 15 frames).
• Think about the music beforehand. Amy had created a song that was perfect for what I envisioned and was also willing to help make the music fit the animation for timing.
  
• Consider if some things need to move faster than others and how many frames are appropriate.
• Having a friend is incredibly helpful, especially one that is good at counting/documenting
• Lighting is difficult to get exactly right unless you really know what you're doing. The lights ended up blowing out some parts of the animation, which in the end appeared as a happy accident rather than a disaster.
• Go with the flow.
• Don't rush.

So in 8 hours of shooting, we got almost 800 pictures that would equal out to about a minute. I was so thankful that we completed it in one night, because if we hadn't finished before the school closed I would have had to clean up and risked the next batch of photos looking different from the first. It took another weekend to edit all the photos (Thank God for Photoshop and Automate Batch) then to dump them into iMovie and make it work together. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and am excited to work on another one.