Thing 321 Stop Motion Video

Pony Boy suggested that I should make a stop motion video for The Project. I think it was early days, but he warned me that it would take me hours and hours. I tend not to listen to such frivolous warnings. I am Dan, and if I choose to shoot a stop motion video inside of an hour and a half then that's exactly what I'll do.

This is a fine idea in theory. Sadly I constantly overestimate my own ability to get the job done. It took seven and a half hours to make two minutes and fifty seconds of video. Would have been longer except that Top Cat was doing the editing.

So this is how it went down:

I told The Frenchman that I wanted to make a stop motion video. He told me he'd no plans, and little else to do for the evening. Top Cat called. I told him, he wanted to join in, but wouldn't be finished work until close to midnight. This is known as the perfect excuse to stay up late and drink wine...

Bah. As if we needed and excuse.

Top Cat joins and we throw together the basic idea for a script (At this point there was very little wine taken, and it's only just gone midnight): Some lego-people playing the part of politicians will meet to discuss the new formation of a new Government. Hilarity will ensue. We'll cobble together a script as we go.

Top Cat cuts out some faces, The Frenchman sets up the camera... we get ready to roll...

Three hours later...

Four bottles of wine are now empty, we're cracking open a few beers and we've got the rough outline of a script, near to three hundred photos taken, we're singing Enya, and for some reason Joan Burton is a skeleton. Most of the characters have actual masks on, and we're making less sense but laughing an awful lot more.

Three hours later...

The beer is gone, it's after six in the morning, the rest of The Sluggery is about to get up for work and we've had ketchup bottles, salt, more Enya and a tiny drop of sipping whiskey thrown into the mix. Now Top Cat is now taking over the show, he edits and we supervise, as if we'd know what we were looking at. We kept laughing non stop though. I think we all found it completely hilarious. We laughed our asses off.

Sleep deprivation and drink will do that to you. Everything is hilarious.

Here's the fruit of our labour: Click here for complete insanity.

Feel free to share that around. We're not ashamed of our insanity.

Now what's obvious is that while we all thought this was entirely hilarious at the time, the cold light of day, mixed with sobriety caused our little creation to have a different effect. We still liked it, but now we realise that the entire thing was completely bat-shit insane.

What was Enya doing in there? Why so much ketchup? Why a skeleton? I think we may all need to consult a professional about the well being of our collective mental health.

Moral of the story? Pony Boy was right, it does take ages to make a stop motion video. It also takes four hundred and fifty odd photos and some fun editing software. I ought to pay more attention to that guy.