“I Have PSD” is a creative stop-motion short film by Hyperakt imagining what life would be like if Photoshop features could be used in real life — a world in which fixing life’s small problems are as easy as correcting a photograph.
Photoshop dexterity (PSD) is a skillset acquired by proficient users of Adobe Photoshop, the world’s most ubiquitous digital tool for creating visual ideas. Qualities of PSD include supernatural powers of imagination and an overwhelming desire to constantly make the world more beautiful. PSD affects people from different walks of life. In fact, there is a high probability that you have PSD.
Which tool would you pick if you could only use one in real life?
Introduced in 1967, the Lite-Brite is a children’s toy where colored pegs are inserted into a black board and then illuminated, resembling LED lights. The new music video for the song SMS by David Crowder Band tells a love story using this toy by animating the story one photograph at a time. Someone must have spent an eternity making changes to the Lite-Brite during the making of this video. The hard work definitely paid off in the end though.
Pixilation is the stop motion technique in which humans are used as the subject, moving through slight changes in pose and position in each successive frame. Eric Hanus, a recent graduate from Indiana University, created the above video (titled “Day Drunk”) using the technique, and doing it with a old, hacked film camera to boot. Hanus tells us,
The project was shot on a Bolex NonRelfex 16mm film camera. It was done this spring along with Jeremy and Russell (in the credits) for an Advanced Experimental Film Production class. Instead of going for an abstract, art-house type project, our goal was to create a narrative using a rarely seen experimental technique; pixilation. Since the camera is designed for 16mm motion pictures, we had to disengage the motor and manually trigger the camera to advance one frame at a time.
Cassandra C. Jones created the above tribute to Eadweard Muybridge’s horse motion studies by sifting through 5,000 digital photographs to find 12 that matched the frames in his study. Jones then looped the 12 images in an animation, resulting in a “snap motion” video of a horse galloping.
The photographs that are included in each Snap Motion Re-Animation come from around the world and are taken by different photographers. I collect them from friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, strangers, stock photography agencies, photo exchanges, thrift stores, private collections, want adds, eBay and the public domain archives of the US Army, NOAA and NASA.
Here are a couple new commercials for Brothers printers that blend stop-motion and time-lapse photography in pretty interesting ways with real people. We love how the technique makes the people look like claymation figures walking around in miniature sets. The foreground is done in stop-motion while time-lapse photography provided the scenes shown in the animated paper.
It would have been crazy if they had actually printed out each individual paper of the scene on the wall. Read more…
This has got to be one of the awesomest uses of a record player ever: photographer Kim Pimmel photographed light sources attached to a spinning record player in the dark, and strung the still frames together into a beautifully hypnotic stop-motion video set to Tron.
The stills were shot using a Nikon D90 with up to 20 second exposures for each shot. Pimmel writes,
To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.
The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.
Our only complaint is that the video is much too short.
Less than a year ago when I was a grad student at Berkeley, I heard a guest lecture by Professor Daniel Fletcher in which he discussed his CellScope project. His group aims to transform cell phones into light microscopes to aid in disease diagnosis in developing countries. Turns out the concept can be used for more than medical purposes.
Inspired by the CellScope, Nokia hired Aardman to create the world’s smallest stop-motion film using the Nokia N8 cell phone. The result is “Dot”, a stop-motion film starring an uber-small 9mm tall girl. Aardman had to create 50 different versions of the girl for all her various poses, and spent about one day making every four seconds of the video. Read more…
life.turns. is a creative crowd-sourced stop-motion project by photo sharing service Blipfoto. By dividing the motion of a human walking into eight simple frames, they invited contributors to submit photos of people in one of the eight poses. 1025 photos were submitted in 40 days. After putting the submissions in sequence and aligning them, what resulted was a stop-motion video of thousands of people in 21 different countries walking. Read more…
This video will blow your mind. We’ve all seen light-painting photos and stop-motion animations created with those photos, but marketing agency Dentsu London figured out how to take light painting a step further using an iPad.
By using all sorts of crazy computer modeling and animation techniques, they figured out how to create 3D light-paintings by playing a “CAT-scan” style animation on the iPad while sweeping the iPad through the air. By repeatedly doing this kind of sweeping with various 3D models, they were able to create 3D light painting stop-motion animations. Here’s how they explain it:
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created this fun little stop-motion video showing Pac-Man being played at a movie theater in Switzerland last month. The project had 111 patient volunteers sit, shift, and change shirts over the course of more than four hours. This is the fifth video in Reymond’s GAME OVER project, in which he recreates classic arcade games with humans as pixels.
