Assignment 15: Breathe Life onto Paper

[Filmmaking 101 overview]

Purpose: To experience the creation of motion from a static media.

Basis: Visual storytelling is more than just filming things happening with a camera. There is an entire other side to media production that involves creating the illusion of motion out of individual images. In fact, that is what film is: Individual images which--when shown in proper sequence--tell a story. The very first moving pictures weren't film at all. Early cave art and ancient Egyptian tombs have sequences of events carved one after the other to show the progression of a story. This moved into to Zoetrope and things like flip books.

Directions: Create an animation. You may use any cell-based animation technology you like: A flip book, an animated gif, a moving photo montage/stop motion, claymation, Legos, or even a zoetrope.

Looking Forward: Creating a story from scratch can be hard. Of course, so can telling a long story in a very short overview that is still compelling. The challenge--which is a good thing to keep in mind even with longer productions--is to share the most important bits without giving away the ending too early. That’s what the good people who cut trailers for movies have to do every day.

What to Watch: "Moth" A very creative--and fantastically short--stop motion flick.

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