Blog Post 6- Recipe For Disaster: Stop Motion Group Project

"Recipe for Disaster" is the group project that myself, Caitlin Disney, Molly Burgess, and Brittany Habel completed. In my time at USC, I had never created a stop-motion film, and we all thought it would be something fun and interesting to do as a team. Additionally, our group was basically built as a film crew. I am a filmmaker, so I could direct and edit the film, Caitlin is a photographer so she could shoot it, Molly is a graphic designer and has worked as production designer on a film so she was able to set dress and art design it, and Brittany is an actress so we had our star. All of our respective talents complemented each other in a way that the natural choice for us was to make a short film. Still, we wanted to do something that was original and not a typical film, so we went the stop-motion route.

It is hugely important to recognize a film is simply 24 photographs per second, taken in rapid succession, and then played back to give the appearance of movement. Cinema works because our eyes use persistence of vision to connect the images together and they all appear to be continuous.

Once we decided we wanted to do a stop-motion film, I remembered that I had NO IDEA how to make one. So, I began to research. One site that I read and referenced was a simple E-how page on how to create a stop-motion film...

HOW TO MAKE A STOP MOTION FILM!

Besides that, I watched a youtube video as well...



After the research, I realized that it was definitely possible to complete, we just had to commit A LOT of free time to it, which my group was more than willing to do.

My Personal Role on the Film: Co-Writer, Director, Editor

So, as a group, we knew that the movie had to involve inanimate objects attacking our main character. Quite simply, that's what's funny about stop-motion films. We all decided that it should be about a young woman baking cookies, and then the ingredients attempt to escape. Once we had this idea, I set off to write the script. I knew I would have to pick a couple key ingredients to stage this, so I chose the eggs as the leaders of the group and the first to escape. Then, I chose to have the vanilla extract be the secondary character who would distract Brittany while the others made their getaway. I wrote a couple versions of the exact action that would take place, and sent them all to my group. After this, we collaborated and talked about small parts to change and we added visual gags to the script. Once we had a finalized script, it was my job to create a shot list and a visual style for the film as director.

This was one of the most difficult parts of the process, as I had to edit the film in my mind before we shot, because every photo had to be shot in order. Otherwise, the editing process would have taken years as I tried to find pictures and match them up together. So, I watched the movie in my mind, and made a corresponding shot list. I took special attention to think about how long each shot should last as well, because that affected how many pictures we would take from each respective position. I knew we needed 12 photos for each second I wanted a shot to last, so if I needed one angle to be on screen for 3 seconds, we tried to take 36 pictures, moving the subject a little bit between each take. It made for A LOT of pre-production work and planning, so that I knew exactly what shots to get and how long each should be on screen.

We ended the six-plus hour shoot with over 700 pictures, which was almost exactly what I was planning on from the start, so it worked out well.

After this, I had the task of editing, which actually wasn't too bad because I had already done most of the work in pre-production. We simply made sure the photos came out in titled in sequential order, so that I could import them as a batch and they naturally came one after the other. All I had to do was choose a proper framerate to play them back at, and then cut out a few pictures, hold on some longer, put in a few transitions and titles, and add a soundtrack. All in all, the editing really only took a couple hours and was very simple.

In the end, I'm happy with our final product. Our main goal when we set out was to make a fun short film that would make people laugh, and which would see inanimate objects move to attack our actress. Hopefully, you'll laugh when you watch it, and for the right reasons.

As always, making a film is a collaborative effort, and it made for the ideal team project.

-Brian