Stop Motion: Picking a Flower
I had a series of sketches of my character, a goofy, unworldly figure that I drew during my animation class at Moore College of Art. I started with a simple story. An unworldly character sees a flower and tries to pick it up. To his surprise it is attached to the ground so he uses all his strength to pull it out of the soil and falls backward as a result. Once I had my story I focused on the body motions needed to achieve my character’s goal and started painstakingly drawing his body positions. After the class was over, I wanted a permanent moving record of him interacting with the world. I tried to retain that old fashioned cartoon feeling even though I was using computer-driven techniques which can lead to a seamless motion. First, I scanned all of my character sketches, then I imported the images into Microsoft Movie Maker. Using the software I set the order of my sketches, the timing between sketches, and hand-aligned my register marks. I repeated various images, played with timing and sequencing, and added titles. I also zoomed various drawings to magnify the scene. Then I created an MP4 movie file.
