Stop Motion Animation

For my final project, I was weighing on what exactly to do and then I saw this video and was instantly inspired. I think stop motion is so fascinating and doesn't nearly get enough credit on just how difficult it is to create this type of animation. This particular video was so unique and I loved the sound effects, it's definitely worth checking out!

Water + Sound = Awesome

 

What do you get when you mix Water flowing out of a tube, and a 24hz sine wave sound from a speaker? Nothing but a weird sound, a headache, and a wet floor.... BUT, what if we shot the water, speaker contraption with a camera shooting 24 fps? Well now you get a crazy looking in-camera effect that will blow people's minds!

 In reality, nothing crazy's happening to the water, it's just weaving around a bunch. In camera, however, the water isn't behaving normally. I'm not sure how this works 100%, but I think I have a good idea. Because our camera is only shooting 24 frames per second, we're not capturing all the frames we would normally see. The water is vibrating from the 24hz sine wave, and our camera's capturing 24 fps. Coincidence? I think because we aren't seeing the whole movement of the water, the water looks suspended in mid air.

This works with other frequencies as well. At 25hz, the water appears to be flowing in slow motion, and at 23hz, the water looks like it's going backwards! While this doesn't have much to do with motion graphics, animation, or post-production, I think it's worthy of a blog post. Like Arturo keeps telling us, if you can do something in a camera, do it! I think if you can use this cool trick in an animation, your end result will look amazing!

Old Spice | Questions

A series of commercials that I feel is very underrated in the sense of animation, are the old spice commercials.  Throughout the entire series of these commercials, there is a man who is constantly changing the scene which he is in and what he is doing.  When you think about it, these commercials and the animation that must go into them are quite impressive.  When analyzing it closer I can only imagine that there must be a lot of chroma keying on either green screens or blue screens.  The most intriguing aspect for me though is the water.  At times it is very hard to distinguish between animated water and real water (if they are even using either of the two).  The reason tat I find this soo amazing is because of my experiences with animated water before, most of which you can tell is fake.  Over all, these commercials really are fantastic and deserve recognition for what they are doing here.  

Balloon Animals

This video is quite funny actually.  Even the most viewers would probably be able to tell that it’s not real, thats what makes it humorous.  Despite being able to tell that this is fake, the animation is considerable good (or at least something considerable complex for my knowledge level at this point).  What they did was take real animals, make them into animations, and then ‘balloon’ them.  In a few parts, they show the animals either bouncing or floating, which I find to be quite realistic.  The water itself even looks kind of real, which I know is something hard to achieve with animation.  All in all, this is quite an interesting and funny piece of work.