The Seed - Stop Motion Animimation

I worked with Fernando Gregório on our first Animation project. We were tasked to make a 30 second stop motion animation that would work as a loop.

Fernando and I started off by talking about our past work and what we were interested in. We realized that we had both been thinking about the human and nature and how as a species we often think about humans as separate from nature. Our society is built on the idea that we can take from nature as much as we want with no consequences. We wanted to make an animation about nature and the human being the same.

We looked at work by Wangechi Mutu who often morphs human and nature:

We decided to work with silhouettes after seeing the fish scene in Lotte Reiniger’s 1955 “Thumbelina”.

We wanted the forms in our animation to grow/change/develop over time. For inspirtation we watched Salvador Dali and Walt Disney’s "Destino”. I saw this for the first time when I was in middle school and I have returned to it over and over again.

Our starting form ended up being a seed, we looked at images of seed germination to help us think through how they grow and what shapes they are:

After deciding on our storyline we started cutting out our shapes and making them into animated forms.

In order to animate the figures we cut them out into separate sections at all of their bend points and then added wire behind them. We learned how to do this by watching some online videos.

Once we had cut all of our elements out we started shooting. We used the light table for our surface and background and set up the camera on a tripod facing straight down and adjusted the camera so that the cutouts were in hi-contrast with the background. We set the frame rate to be 30 frames/second.

The shooting was long and slow but in the end really exciting and rewarding. The hardest part was moving the elements slowly so that their movements would look believable. This was especially hard to do when we had multiple elements in close proximity — it is easy to bump one element while trying to adjust another.

I think that this video might look better at a slower frame rate but we wanted to keep our video at about 30 seconds. I found this medium to be really meditative, sometimes frustrating and very beautiful. I definitely want to work with stop motion again.

See the video below or at this link: