A Holiday Stop Motion Video and How it Came Together
Phillip Barnhard
The annual agency holiday video is a project I'm always excited to work on. The last few years, I've been allowed to let my imagination run free, which usually results in really great creative work. In 2011, I dabbled in stop motion art using sticky notes and other office supplies. In 2012, I decided comedic storytelling and puppeteering was the best route to take. This holiday season, I got to check another art off my video bucket list: shooting stop motion straight onto the ground. I accomplished that with The Gift Exchange.
Stop-motion animation is always the most grueling, yet rewarding production technique. Sometimes it may take up to 10 minutes to set up a single frame. The reward comes when you step back after hours of shooting, and you watch the story come together on screen. Dragonframe stop motion software — the same used on ParaNorman and Frankenweenie — made it easy to cycle through captured frames and see how our project was coming along.
With The Gift Exchange, it took a consistent crew of three animators working 8-hour days a little over a week to film. We had to play production and cleaning crew with fabric scraps and lighting cables getting in the way of the perfect shot. With pre- and post-production included, that amounted to roughly 300 man-hours. Luckily, everyone was happy to help.
Looking back, I would say it was one of the most ambitious projects that I've taken on, but I love a challenge. I was excited when we couldn't find a video trestle to rent/purchase because that meant we got to wander the aisles of Lowe's dreaming of how to build such a contraption. [In case you're curious, a photography backdrop stand, roof framing bracket and some metal screws should do the trick.] Whenever there was a production hurdle, we cleared it with logic. With that mentality, there's a sense of pride earned in that final capture.