This was a fun one! I definitely want to explore more ideas with EyeJack in the future, there’s so much that could be done with it, particularly in advertising – in case I ever need to promote something in the future (photography business, social media, who knows!)
The Results!
My process
Brainstorming…
My first step in coming up with the idea for my poster was deciding what media to use. My classmate Oliver was using stop motion for his own poster and it inspired me to use that for mine as well. I wanted to use claymation since I’ve made several projects with that medium and it’s just fun to do!
So I have the idea – but what to do with it?
My next step was to figure out what would happen in the video. Almost immediately I thought of a little coffee monster in a cup, and I liked that idea because a blob is very easy to animate since there’s no necessary shape I have to adhere to and no frame to deal with which is awesome. XD And it was pretty easy actually, taking the frames for the animation probably took 45 minutes total, it was the editing that was the real beast, which I’ll get into more later.
Title/Theme:
The title and theme actually came to me when I was editing the animation – I liked the title of “Take a Break…” because I felt it would grab people’s attention. I intended for it to be a sort of invitation to the viewer. And the “Or you might spill your cup” was a natural ending to the sequence in my mind, both because it’s a little pun to fit in with the coffee theme and to tie up the reason I encouraged the viewer to take a break in the first place. The theme is literally just that – the little monster is poured into the situation, looks like maybe he’s got a hand on things, but quickly spills over. It’s something relatable to me since I can get so wrapped up in school and assignments and schedules etc etc that sometimes I forget to sip out a bit of all that coffee/stress/pressure and it just spills over – I can feel overwhelmed! I hope to channel more of this little guy XD. Even 5 minutes outside in silence can feel like I’m formatting my brain – it’s nice to clear out the mental chatter!
So how did I make it?
To create the animation, I used an app I’ve been using for my other stop motion projects called Stop Motion Studio.
It’s so simple to use and very versatile – I used it with a camera tethered to it for the first time and it worked brilliantly!
I was able to erase my hand which was in the frame to hold up the stream of coffee in the beginning very quickly within the program with the erase tool, as well as duplicating frames to make it longer.
Challenges – they did happen XD
Issue #1
The first issue I ran into was the frame rate on EyeJack. I hadn’t checked beforehand what the frame rate was and had my animation set to 8fps in the Stop Motion Studio app, but when I uploaded it to EyeJack it was way too fast.
My solution to that was to duplicate each frame twice to make it longer, and went from 70 frames total to around 200 frames total. And after that it looked much closer to my original vision!
But as I later realized, I was stressing over the wrong issue…
Issue #2
For whatever reason, I thought that I could only use individual images to make a sequence in EyeJack, but Oliver pointed out that we could also upload mp4s. This solved my second issue, which was the looming prospect of resizing 235 individual images! Relieved, I realized I could resize the images by making them into a video and changing the dimensions of the entire video. Oliver once again came in clutch and knocked out the editing in about 10 minutes – many thanks to him, I would’ve overcomplicated it for sure! XD
Last thoughts…
I really do believe in this poster’s message! I hope it can be a fun reminder to whoever watches it to step back and empty that cup/brain a bit!