Her Morning Elegance

Stop motion is one of the most time consuming animations to make but the visual result is worth the effort. Stop motion has been used in music videos before, most noteably on MTV, this one in particular worth sharing. "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie and produced by Michal Dayan took over six weeks to script and storyboard and then 48 hours to shoot all the pictures. I have, along with the orignal video, shared the "making of HME". Enjoy.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

This weekend I finally watched "The Nightmare Before Christmas". I know, I'm late to the game, but now I can see what all the hype is about. What a intricate and fantastic display of animation. As most of you know, this movie was released in 1993 and it was directed by Henry Selick and produced/co-written by Tim Burton. It tells the tale of Jack Skellington, a resident of Halloweentown, a town that is perpetually Halloween, who wants to experience more of the world. After wandering around, he finds himself in Christmastown, which, as you would expect, is a town that is always Christmas. Excited by the change in scenery, he works to get the Christmas spirit into Halloweentown. This film was entirely stop-motion animation. A crew of over 120 workers worked with 227 puppets representing the characters seen in the movie. They worked on 20 sound stages (sometimes used simultaneously during filming). The movie amounted to 109,440 frames, which is truly incredible for a stop-motion film. Each main character had multiple heads in order to express a broad range of emotion. Jack Skellington had about 400 heads! I am so glad that I watched this movie and if you haven't seen it yet, I would highly recommend it!

Lego Animation that isn't the Lego Movie

Stop animation is hard enough to do, but stop animation using legos is a whole new ballpark. This is what animated the music video for "Fell In Love With A Girl" by the White Stripes. Michel Gondry directed this video in 2002 and it would later win three MTV Video Music Awards for that year including Breakthrough Video, Best Special Effects, and Best Editing. The video was shot frame by frame and each frame had a completely rebuilt lego arrangement to simulate movement. This painstaking animation was something that hadn't been done before in a music video. The attention to detail and the planning that went into making this video is so easy to see. The lego blocks are brought to life and they create a great high-energy vibe to the music video.

I have always been in love with stop animation. it was actually the first projects I made as a young lad. but a few months ago a co worker told me to watch this short animation by James Davenhill from bad apple media. i find it really beautiful and sad in that good way. I hope you enjoy it as much as i do.