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Friday, January 27, 2012

New Stop-Motion: An Ode to Hitchcock

I really like Alfred Hitchcock (I'm a film major).  I always found his subtle humor very funny.  However, he is more of a humorist than a comedian.  I don't often find myself laughing out loud, but I often get very big grins.  I'm not sure if that's an accurate distinction between a humorist and a comedian, but I'm not really an expert on the matter.  Regardless, I hope you enjoy my new video.


Production notes:
I started this project by surveying my room looking for things to make dance.  My eyes fell on a Christmas present that my loving sister, Christina, gave me.  I immediately knew that I wanted to animate words, but I was unsure if I should do a song or a speech.  I looked up some speeches, but none of them felt right.  Then I thought of movie quotes, which made me think of Hitchcock.  I pulled the audio from his 1950s TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and compiled it in Audacity.  After I had the audio I transcribed it so I knew what all the words were.  Then I set up my camera rig on the side of my desk so that it looked down on a small nightstand.  Then I filmed the animations you see above.  After filming, I downloaded all the video and used iMovie to pull all of my images (I find it easier to pull images in iMovie than in AvidMC).  While pulling my images I realized that I had actually forgotten a few words.  Luckily, I had left my camera rig in place just in case I had to re-shoot.  Thank goodness I did.  Once I was finished re-shooting I got the final images I needed.  I then exported the video to Avid where I went about syncing the animations to the audio, which was by far the most time intensive part of the project.  Finally, I added some filters to make the video reflect the era and quality of the audio.  

Ode to Hitchcock by the numbers:
  • 760 unique images in the video.
  • 20 hours of total production time
    • 4 hours of finding and mixing audio
    • 3 hours of set up and filming
    • 12 hours of editing and syncing
  • 4 different audio clips from 3 different episodes.

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