Cooking With Angela: Stop Motion

 I've been following Selfie Magic for a little while now, and she has a fabulous weekly self portrait photo challenge but until this week I've been busy and haven't given it a whirl... This week's challenge was just too fun to resist! I've taken an absurd amount of photos over the years, and I've always found it fun when I flip through the images to choose my favorites when editing that they look like a stop motion animation =P I decided rather than taking one photoshoot and turning it into a film I'd go a little more in depth and do several shoots! The first thing that came to mind would have been to do all of my photos from a whole year, but wow that would have taken forever to sift through the unusable photos (improperly exposed/composed, stupid faces, etc) So I chose instead to do each of my cooking photoshoots from last year's "Cooking With Angela" series from deviantArt! Each week I did a self-portrait shoot cooking a new recipe, and since most weeks I kept the camera on the tripod in the same position for the whole shoot I thought it lent itself well to stop-motion =D I wound up with over 800 individual frames, and it took me quite a while to figure out a good speed for the fluidity I wanted (most photos are 8 frames, the first one from each shoot is a little longer to avoid awkward transitions) And the video is still 4 minutes long!

I haven't done much video editing since college since I don't have a video camera, it was loads of fun to do some creating again! (my major in college was film management, and my college made sure we knew how to both manage and create radio, tv, and film) Not that my video is perfect, I wish I would have spent a little more time making the cuts better timed to the music, but after 6 hours sifting through pictures and then trying and retrying slide lengths I was just glad to have something!

All the final, edited photos that I did for the project are over at my deviantArt (here). It's really cool to look at the video, where all the photos are unretouched and uncropped, and see how I came to a final image on each one... I'm so glad for photoshop is all I can say! Also looking through the raw files, I realized how I've stopped taking as many photos each shoot...When I first started I was unsure as to if I had a good photo or not, so I took a ton! There are a lot of images that didn't even make the video from some of the first half of the year... but towards the end I had to use every frame I had just to have a decent length for that shoot! It was fun to go back and look at all the images though, and it was awesome that I got to include plenty of shots of my muscle man! =D

I'll definitely be linking up more often now, this was such a fun challenge!