Working at a boutique creative firm is rarely tedious; nice people ask for your help solving specific problems, none of which is the same. Thus far, my clients’ requests tend to fit into a Venn diagram of social media management/public relations/content strategy/media production/product photography/and marketing strategy. Within that bracket, social media tends to have the most flexibility. It’s content strategy designed to be shared and elaborated upon.
If you’re managing a company’s brand via social media, that can absolutely, and should, entail skills beyond posting links and writing copy. One publisher—Macmillan’s award-winning comic book branch, First Second Books—has asked me to help celebrate their library for the past six months. With an editorial schedule that includes multiple monthly releases, a metric ton of press, and a creator lineup featuring The Adventure Zone’s McElroy family, brainstorming fresh angles for daily posts was not difficult. But the form factors? I don’t know. Anyone can post jpegs and write marketing copy littered with emojis and exclamation points. I wanted to play.
I initially branched into some product photography, and then I noticed some great stop-motion work on Facebook for shoes and other consumer packaged goods. I’d never produced a stop-motion video before, but I liked the effect. It distilled a point into a handful of shots, telling a narrative woven between frames that lasted fractals of seconds.
I was the former photo editor of a fancy music magazine and I’d shot video before, so it wasn’t outside my skill set. Strategically, SMVs are also the perfect vehicle for the low-attention spans of Twitter and Instagram. And if you’re familiar with Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, Henry Selick, and the Laika oeuvre, you know the magic that can be conjured through the medium. (Just don’t aim to give your client the nightmares those artistes perfected.)
Rationale provided, I decided to make some stop-motion product animations for books.
Briefly, stop-motion animation consists of taking pictures of objects that are marginally moved or altered from shot to shot. When viewed consecutively (and quickly), they give the impression of independent movement and transformation. This is by no means a tutorial, but here’s what I used for the production and I’d recommend for anyone curious.
• A camera whose focus you can manually control. If a camera’s using autofocus, it may change said focus from shot to shot, whereas the goal is to have as much visual continuity in lighting, ISO, focus, aperture, and placement. The camera can also be a smart phone camera, but manual control over its settings is a must (the VSCO app can provide that functionality).
• A few external flashes. I shoot at night so that ambient sunlight doesn’t change my lighting from shot to shot. Controlling that variable sufficiently—and artfully— requires a few external flashes. These can be expensive (I use three Canon Speedlites), but folks have worked miracles with flashlights and sheets.
• A shutter remote. It may not seem like it, but simply pressing the shutter release button on a camera will jostle the camera, offsetting the image by a few pixels. Avoid that shake from frame to frame with a remote, or at least use a timed setting.
• A tripod. Similar to the rationale for the remote, a tripod will keep your camera rooted to maintain visual continuity from shot to shot, save the elements you want altered.
• If you want to dive deeper down the stop-motion rabbit hole, these are fun, too.
Here are some of the stop-motion videos I made, in order of their production. I’ll upload future ones as well.
Pumpkinheads, by Rainbow Rowell & Faith Erin Hicks
This was by far the easiest production and still my favorite. It consists of a few miniature pumpkins and autumn leaves skating across a book that celebrates all things fall.
Dragon Hoops, by Gene Luen Yang
I could have mirrored the last theme and had a bunch of basketballs roll by Gene Luen Yang’s charming biography/autobiography—the story of an Oakland high school basketball team’s attempt at the state championship—but I wanted to do something more complex. Admittedly it…kind of works and kind of doesn’t. Having a miniature basketball suspended from fishing line, I dangled it over the set using a boom arm with clamps, inching it toward a miniature basketball hoop. The basketball doesn’t… quite move into an arc. But it’s arc-ish? I’m ecstatically proud of the glitter touch, though.
Go With The Flow, by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann
There’s a very, very big difference between the previous two videos and the one below. See if you can guess.
OK… I’ve waited two minutes, so I’m going to guess you’ve figured it out: the other two productions were shot upright whereas the one below was shot on the floor, the camera aimed down. This was the longest and sweatiest shoot, even though it looks substantially more simple. For vertical shoots, you hover. A lot. You hunch. The camera is counterweighted facing down, so it requires a different, more uncomfortable working process. Anyway, my girlfriend pointed out that the tampons aren’t symmetrical, but art isn’t always symmetrical, Aimee! This book is about erasing the stigma of menstruation, and it’s just so lovely and important and well-paced. Even if my video isn’t symmetrical, you should read it anyway.
Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier, by Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks
I’ve acquired a lot of toys and stickers to be a stop-motion director, but that shuttle below is by far my favorite. I wanted to convey a galactic journey, so I made multiple backgrounds with different star placements, hung a few planet cutouts, and used the stuffing of my dog’s toys for exhaust to show the shuttle moving across the screen. If I could be compared to Stanley Kubrick, but adorable, I’d be fine with that.
:01 Reading Stack
Sometimes you just have to read many, many books.