Quick Post : Stop Motion

A cinematographic phenomenon that I find incredibly interesting is one revolving around stop motion. Everyone knows what stop-motion is. [If you don't, think claymation, like Nightmare Before Christmas, or take a look at this Switchfoot music video to see an example of non-claymation stop-motion.

When people use claymation, they want the motion to be as fluid and life-like as possible, generally speaking, evident in Nightmare, Corpse Bride, and countless other [and non Tim Burton] films and shorts. I would think that's pretty obvious. Sometimes, when a director wants something to look like stop-motion, they remove a couple frames and make it look choppy. Then it dawned on me, while watching this Regina Spektor music video, that even if a director is using stop-motion*, like in this video and the Switchfoot one, they want it to look choppy, the obvious implication being that, if the stop-motion were too fluid, the audience would lose the effect of the stop-motion and see the film as another, traditionally filmed piece.

*I know for a fact that the Switchfoot video uses stop-motion. As for Regina Spektor's, I'm fairly certain that in this video they use a lot of real photographic stop-motion, particuarly so in the beginning, as well as the film-then-remove-frames technique, though I could be mistaken, as animation and stop-motion are not actually my strong points.

Blogging and Stopping

I've been thinking about blogging lately. I've slowed down on my posts between freshman year and now, but I'm not the only one. Most of my friends that I follow from LHS '09 have ceased to write new updates. I was wondering why this was. Of course, we're all busy on and offline, but surely we're not much busier than we were at this time last year?

I think I've figured it out.

Last year, everything was new. We left our homes - some of us *coughcough* having never had the opportunity to live in any other town for more than three weeks at a time. We left friends, families, and the comforts of homes. We were pushed into many new worlds, including academic and social ones. We had to adapt to the new, unsupervised lifestyle of the college student, and we had to scramble to find our place in the new social scene. And we were blogging. Blogging itself was new, but we were blogging because of that which was new.

Now, we've adapted. We're sophomores. This is our new normal. So while still 'new' in the sense that we've only been living this routine for about a year out of our almost twenty, it's still old. We're used to it now.

I'm not saying that this is the only reason we've stopped writing new posts, but I'm sure it's a huge prat of it. I can't imagine any of us think that 'oh my gosh another day in ___ class' or 'hey did you see that really obnoxious thing that happened on Saturday night' could possibly interest our fellow high school graduates any more, for the simple fact that they've probably seen much of the same in the last year. And to be completely honest, how exciting does it all seem now to us, the writers?

Of course, we're also really busy.