Oh, God, Why: Production Memory Lane

I was inspired to take a trip down memory lane (kind of) and ventured into my YouTube account of high school work. It’s interesting comparing now to then. I think I’m still proud of the stuff I did all those (4…) years ago, but I also think it would be interesting to give some of it another go—redo them with a better knowledge of production. My favorite (and most relevant) piece was a stop motion animation video about a hot air balloon to the moon. I made it with felt, using a felt board background with felt characters and objects. The felt and 2D-ness made it easy to move stuff around because felt sticks to felt. Well, felt sticks to felt if you’re careful and paying attention. I ran into a lot of issues in the approximately 20 hours it took me to make 30 seconds. I kept knocking things and forgetting things and the lighting kept changing… in reality, the quality of this video is not even a little impressive—you can’t even read the title sequence. I still like it though. I still like the story. I still appreciate the amount of work it took me to get those semi-mediocre 30 seconds. I think I’d like to do it again someday. I’d like to revisit the story and try it again and make it better. Then I’ll have a nice “Then and Now” retrospective to impress people with at parties.