Our one minute stop-motion animation video is complete. Hooray! It only took us around 20 hours over two days to put this together, but I will say I’m very happy with the outcome!

Ella and I met on Friday at 10am to shoot. It took us around 2-3 hours to set up and by 1pm we were ready and shooting.

Because of our story, we had lots of things that coming into the frame, so we also set them up on the floor next to us to keep ourselves organized and efficient. Hooray for all my pre-production experience before ITP 😛

Around 2pm…. one of our lights died, and we didn’t realize it until we had shot a couple of frames and it started to look really dark. ::sigh:: It took us a while how to take out the battery from the light (seriously… I’m embarrassed) but we finally managed to change it correctly, backtrack a bit and keep going. A little bit after that,…. our camera battery died. The problem with this was that we needed to take out camera from the tripod entirely in order to switch the battery. But, with no other option, we did it, and had to re-set up.

Once that was fixed, we kept powering through for a couple of hours. We had a couple of mishaps with placement, as we quickly realized that working with plants (and how they move) is more challenging that we originally anticipated. After around 11 hours of shooting, we were done! A little jittery and not exactly perfect, but we were pretty happy with the outcome.

On Sunday, we met to edit and finalize the short. I’ve heard (and experienced) that editing in teams is a pain, and I have to say that (in my opinion), Ella and I worked really well together! We were very much in synch for the edit part of the process, and got into a really good groove for the audio part.

The short is not perfect, and there’s some glitches, but I’m really happy with the outcome. We created an awesome world and actually made magic!

Sprucing Up from Paula Ceballos on Vimeo.

Update: someone in class mentioned how this looks like a monster/creature mating call. So interesting! and it actually does look like it… so maybe there’ll be an update to the title? who knows 😉