THE PRESENTATION

THE 20% TIME SPEECH

20% Time Speech: Learning the Art of Stop-Motion:

Was there ever a time in your life as a kid when you wished your toys would come to life? For my 20% Time Project, I wanted to challenge this question. Could it possibly be done? Well first of all, it is impossible for toys to literally come to life, but I got pretty close. How, you may ask? Magic – the magic of stop-motion.

Now, before I go on any further, what exactly is stop-motion? Simply put, it’s one of the many types of techniques used to create animations. It’s made by moving objects at small increments individually at a time to create an illusion that it is actually moving when the pictures are played consecutively. Ok, that must’ve sounded really confusing. Basically, you take a picture of an object, move it a little, take another picture, and so on. When you play all these pictures consecutively in rapid speed, the object looks like it is moving.

So, stop-motion is used to create all sorts of films, ranging from short animations (what I’m going to show you today) to commercials, advertisements, and even full movies, such as Fantastic Mr. Fox and Paranorman. There are many others, of, course, but I’d like to share with you what I’ve accomplished during past 6 months in the very limited time I have with you today.

For the first 3 months-or-so, I’ve been working on learning how to create stop-motions. This included learning various lighting positions, animation techniques, and camera movement. During this time, I created several different test footages to get hands-on experience, and learned new things along the way from trail-and-error. I was fascinated after learning how complex making stop-motion actually was, and was finally ready to attempt my own short little animation.

The first thing to do was to come up with an idea. It took a while, but I thought it’d be really cool if it could have something to do with the Rubik’s Cube, since that’s not something you see every day, is it?. From then on, I sketched out the script for the animation, and then went right along to shooting the images.

Of course, no accomplishments come without obstacles and mistakes. There were many challenges I faced during the course of making my animation – most of them attacked me before I even got started because they mostly all had to do with having no decent equipment. For example, it was pretty embarrassing when I finally realized that my cheap camera doesn’t work properly when it comes to making stop-motion. Luckily, at that time, my parents were finally considering buying me a brand new camera, so I ended up working with a Canon EOS Rebel T5i – currently the newest and best model of the canon rebel series. Basically, a pretty advanced camera! But, I mean, probably the hardest challenge I’ve faced were the effects of procrastinating. And procrastinating, especially when it comes to stop-motion, can lead up to very… difficult times.

Why? Here is the one thing that I want to point out to you today: creating stop-motion animations take time – a LONG time, too much time in my opinion. Here’s an easy comparison to demonstrate how long it creating them are: it takes about roughly one hour of work to produce 10 seconds of an animation. That’s 1 hour of straight continuous work, btw. So for instance, if you want to create a 1 minute animation, you can assume it’ll take at least 6 hours of work.

Anyways, I’m proud of how my animation turned out. It took a long time – about 8 hours of shooting, and 2 hours of additional editing. Though, I’m going to be real honest with you now; sometimes, I lost so much motivation from the time and effort it took that I almost wanted to quit. But don’t get me wrong here, I really enjoyed the process. And besides, I’m glad I didn’t, since I accomplished my goal of creating my short animation, which I will show to you now.

There are still things I'd like to learn, but I think I've mastered the basics for now. Although it took a lot of effort, I think it was worth it. Overall, this project was a great experience, and I hope you can agree with me when I say that I made the toys come to life... Thank you.