Creative Entry #9: Aaaand ... action!

I was so sure I had some deep, meaningful, and insightful thing to say about this creative endevour, but en route from my last class to my dorm my brain apparently decided to shut down and I can no longer recall ANY of what that may have been ... blammit.

In any case, so far most of my creative activities have been drawing in some form or another, and the odd story here and there. This week's is no different ... except that it is different, actually. My assignment for Photography class was to capture 30-40 seconds of live-action film, but in a sort of stop-motion style using a handheld video recorder. Now I've only used video recorders to shoot family film, and I don't have one myself, nor am I familiar with how to use the editing sofware to fancify videos, or Macs for that matter. Thankfully, I didn't need to do and cutting or editing, since all the starting and stopping was done on the camera.

I had hoped I'd be able to get away with "traditional" stop motion, that is to say, using a regular camera and just stringing the photos together on Photoshop or a similar program. However, it was not to be, and on Thursday I found myself running around campus trying to rent a camera, get blank tapes for it, record something, return the camera, and convert and save the file into an .avi before my next class. I barely made it.

Barely.

The result is as follows: forty seconds of stop-motion live-action film (if such a thing can exist ...) of me drawing the face of my OC Jaris. This ties in loosely with my entry about the tutorials I made on DeviantArt, as it shows the process of how I draw, just in very bad lighting and with a grainy quality to the video, almost to the extent that you can't see what's going on. Surprisingly, and despite being forced out of my burrow (AKA: my dorm room) to find film for the thing, I enjoyed filming this project, and was even a little dismayed it had to be so short. Maybe in future I'll do something similar again, only showing the entire process of how I draw and not just a headshot in dim light.

The video can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVemjWiGEjo


--Sak