They’ve never heard of the California Raisins
In addition to the usual film clubs, my new club this semester is Animation Club (now renamed ANNIE to better fit with DAVE). When I pitched it, I was thinking we could use Final Cut Express and layers to do some computer-based 2D animation. I knew we wouldn’t have the time or attention spans needed to learn Flash, but using layers and keyframes seemed like a decent way to do some simple animations.
On the first day, I described the 2D “drawing-based” animation, but I also proposed stop-motion animation as an alternative. I could tell that the concept was pretty foreign to nearly everyone, as it should be, since 3D computer animation has basically rendered stop motion pointless. So just to demonstrate, I storyboarded an improvised tale of Dixie Cupp, played by a Dixie cup, and her friend Elmer, as played by a bottle of Elmer’s glue.
As a class, we quickly went through the process of situating a stationary camera and inching the actors along through their motions. Then we went into the computer lab where I ran through a hasty version of editing together a stop-motion movie.
The project was crude and clumsy but it was amazing to see their imaginations activated. This totally inspired them, and now I think everyone’s doing a stop motion movie. Today in club, some of us helped shoot most of Stephen’s “March of the Origami Penguins,” in which a scientist’s notes fold themselves up into origami penguins and march off while she’s out of the room. Everybody else was either finishing up their storyboards or building their characters out of clay.
I don’t have any idea what most of their ideas are at this point, but when I was loading up people’s models into a box at the end of the day, I got pretty excited to see what they’re going to come up with. This should be a productive club. I think I’ll post “The Adventures of Dixie Cupp” the next time we’re in the lab and I have a chance to compress it.