1000 Still images, all in a row! [How I Made a Stop Motion Video]

So, I was tasked with making a “demonstration” video for a competition I’m running over on the Think Tank Photo Facebook page, basically I wanted to show various camera bags all fitting inside each other to promote the little competition. I thought I’d post it up here for two reasons, the first being that it’s a great little video – if I do say so myself! – and to invite you all to enter because it’s free, there’s none of that rights-grabbing going on and you don’t need to do anything other than follow Think Tank Photo on Twitter, Flickr or Facebook and the prize is pretty cool, too! You win a Logistics Manager and whatever other Think Tank Photo products you can stuff inside it – details here.

So, you’ve probably all heard of stop motion? The first thing I think of when I hear people talk about stop motion is that clip from ages ago, the one of the Russian dolls from Sesame Street where they all come out of one another bit by bit. There are some amazing stop motion videos these days, the one about the marmite is great and there’s the one with the girl in bed which is very very impressive!

Think Tank Photo Stop Motion.

How did we make it? Well, my friend Nathan and I spent five hours in his living room, we cleared the place out and set up a roll of seamless white background paper and set about moving the bags very slowly, bit by bit, and taking a photograph at each point, so *snap* and move each of the CF cards about an inch *snap* move all the CF cards another inch – and so on, for five hours! Once you have all of your stills (962 in the end, actually) You sift through and make sure there are no glaring mistakes or colour issues, Nathan is a perfectionist, so he actually re-touched a little sensor spot out of all the images, more than half he had to do manually, so that’s a big job!! Images finished, I drop them onto the time-line of Final Cut Pro, the video editing software that I use and set the images to be a duration of about 4 frames each – when you consider we’re working at about 25 frames per second, that’s about 6 images a second… So, before you fall asleep listening to me ramble on about frames per second and so on, here it is!…

We had great fun making this video! You should try your own and post a link to it via the Digital Photography School Facebook page!

I hope you enjoyed it and hope we get to see one of yours soon!

–Sime