Pendulum - Stop mo

First off I have to start by staying this was definitely the most painful day I've experienced. The unforgiving nature of stop motion angers me to a level I can't understand. I will learn to love this as I can see the benefits and skills it teaches, a real life practical application of timing and spacing. Joe and Johnny always say don't start an animation without planning so I've been strictly abiding by those rules, which tends to mean I spend a good amount of time planning before I even enter the stop motion room.

 This being my second pendulum animation, I decided it would be best this time to have an actual video reference which was a crude video of a pen swinging from some headphones, I was in a public space so it was a bit embarrassing to record. From the video what I learned was how the pendulum comes to a stop, the swings a short obviously but they are incredibly slow, and moving in other directions rather than just left to right.

 I did a bar sheet recording this and as most of my bar sheet are, this was almost nine seconds. I think this is something I need to work on because the amount of work I'm giving my self to is stupid, and I need to refine what the key things are that I need to animate. I also did a story board for the block interaction but that's for another blog.

 Feeling good, i walked into an empty stop motion room, and set up for my pendulum. It's quite ridiculous how slow of a worker I am, everything I do is slow and it's an annoying quality I need to fix, because I spend an excessive amount of time setting up the camera and lights because I need it to be 'perfect' or at least to my own standards. Moving on to my first attempt, after setting the measurements for the 'string', i started the first few frames for the initial swing. Everything was going great up until I watched back the footage after I completed the first swing and I had zoomed in in the middle of swing. I knew exactly what it was, I had touched the camera with the back of my head moving the block but for whatever the reason the preview on the program didn't show it.


pendulum 1 oscillation shit test STOPM from muntasir chowdhurry on Vimeo.


Obviously I was angry at this moment and decided to go for a break. I think the break I took was too long but I needed time to compose myself, because one swing took me while I understood at this moment that i lot of work to do in one go with no fuck ups. When working in the stop motion the amount of concentration as well as persistence for each frame is extraordinary. Unfortunately I didn't really have the brain power in me to do that so when I went in I just went a bit balls to walls and pushed out the animation as fast as I could.



pendulum STOPM from muntasir chowdhurry on Vimeo.




I'm not too happy with the way it came out as it looks very jittery, I know I fix this by using a protractor to get a perfect ark. I'll end this post by saying I will love stop motion even if it kills me.