Hello everyone!
As an avid fan of music in general, I enjoy other types of art aswell. I first gained an appreciation for stop-motion animation during my short stay in the Netherlands. In art class, our task was to create a short, 30 second long stop-motion animation. Needless to say, I found the challenge intriguing and had a lot of fun making it.
My love for stop-motion animation was further nourished when I first started listening to the band Tool. Adam Jones, the band’s guitarst, is also the key creator of their videos, which are based on the stop-motion formula. Their gritty style and surreal feeling totally caught my attention. The video for “Sober” is a great example.
Creating such a stop-motion animation, however, is not quite as easy as it might sound or look. It is a long and tedious process of perfectionalizing every shot, every take. Making even one little mistake will have a negative effect on the end-product, so it is necessary to work as careful and concentrated as possible. This can take a VERY long time to accomplish, even for a short, 30-second video. It took me and my classmate an hour of coming up with the idea, 3 hours of preparing the materials and 2 hours of filming. Luckily, it is enjoyable to do, so the time was spent wisely.
Our idea was to create something abstract, something very simple, yet original. Something that was stripped of a traditional meaning, yet something that made you think, made you feel. So, we thought about the most basic geometric shapes, the building blocs of everything: triangles and squares. We thought about how life is an endless cycle of construction and destriction, chaos and order. I plan on studying biology, so a huge inspiration for this project were enzymes: how they move, how they work, how they create and destroy.
Of course, when you look at our video below you might only see some weird, funny-looking shapes, moving in a strange way. That is totally acceptable, because art can be interpreted in different ways and to be fair, it looks pretty simple and hasty. Hopefully, you will enjoy our creation as much as we enjoyed making it.
