In the turbulent weeks of the Presidential Election, there is nothing better I can do than stay occupied and I took this time to experiment with some personal work. Also, commercial work has been slow, so it’s always a good time to use this time to polish skills. It’s been a while since I wanted to do a stop-motion animation using paper and clay as part of the animation elements, and since there is a family trip next month (Dec. 2024), I wanted to use this as the central subject.
One of the reasons I like to do stop-motion animation is that I’m terrible at drawing, and it is easier for me to use actual objects or pre-made drawings to incorporate into my stop-motion animations. This time, I found some great illustrations by talented designer Yuliya P. from Briefstock that matched the background I wanted to combine into the final stop-motion animation. I was looking for a desert background and vegetation.
I extracted various elements from Yuliya P.’s illustrations that I wanted to use on my background and placed them on a tabloid page for print. I added a large white stroke around each illustration to give a sticker look and to make it more practical to cut out. After cutting each illustration, I start thinking about how to make the cutout paper stand so it can be animated.
My first thought was to use a piece of wood as a stand since I had previously used this technique in other projects; this was my first try, but it did not work because it was too tedious to custom-cut each piece of wood to match the shape of the illustrations. After some material exploration, I used craft foam, which worked well. It was easy to cut and adapt to the paper-printed illustration but very messy!
After preparing all the elements for my animation, I started sketching some ideas on how it would be animated. The idea was to have an animated background and central element to add a depth-of-field effect, but since there were too many elements, I needed to plan accordingly. I separated it into three parts: first, I animated the background landscape, then the car. These two animations were merged in post-production using After Effects.
Finally, I animated my hands, simulating sculpting a car using clay, and compiled everything into one final animation. As usual, the most complicated part was timing and speed. I still need to polish that area to make movements more smoothly.
Check out the Desert Roat Trip final video below, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Most of the time I meet new people, I get asked the same question, ‘What is it that you do?’ which does not bother me in any way; on the contrary, it is an opportunity to expand the conversation and share why a creative consultant is an essential partner for businesses and organizations. With many job titles in the creative and tech industry, I understand; it can be challenging to comprehend what a person does. Rock Star Designer? Pixel Ninja? Creative Consultant? LOL! Yes, I know, our little ego—we love to sound and look different, but we also are passionate about making a difference!
Stop-motion animation is a technique that has been used for over a century to bring inanimate objects to life on screen. This unique animation style has been used to create some of the most iconic films and commercials of all time, and it continues to be a popular choice for brands looking to promote their products in an engaging and memorable way. In this article, I will explore the benefits of stop-motion animation for brands and their products, and why it continues to be a valuable tool in the world of advertising.
In the last two years, our society has experienced many changes that have forced us to pivot our human behaviors in many aspects. We have adapted and learned to function and navigate new environments in many ways: such shifts require us to be creative and have a problem-solving attitude, and it has been such a beautiful experience to see how exercising creativity is helping us to make the best of this transitions we are having, which made me think about the implementation of creativity in every business.
I’ll be lying if I said I do not have mixed feelings about Ai art generator Midjourney. Last month I experienced Midjourney for the first time, which was quite interesting and scary. As I mentioned in my previous post, it was an amazing-threatening-scary experience. It’ll be interesting to hear what are the founders’ thoughts and the direction they want to take with this project. I suppose they are trying to feed the machine and learn more about how people use Midjourney to explore creativity for now, or who knows…
Even with mixed feelings, I think it is a great technology that will help creatives reduce production time in some areas of design/creativity, allowing creatives have more time to do what they love. However, although Ai art generators may help creatives or anybody to create concepts in a few seconds using only text prompts, I think it is important not to forget about nurturing creativity as humans.
