While I'm not planning on becoming the next new stop-motion animator, I did get the opportunity to experience the process this past weekend at the second annual Design Family Reunion in Santa Fe, New Mexico. What I learned had less to do about creativity, but more about patience, planning and perseverance.
It's only a seven second film, but it took at least one hour to conceive and plan and shoot then render this "draft" of a movie. My guess to make this clip "perfect," it would take me a full day…which I would gladly sign up for.
I was able to work under the tutelage of the amazing illustrator Chis Sickles of Rednose Studio. His process is not traditionally stop motion, rather no motion at all. However, his style is captured using photography of meticulously manufactured characters, very much like those stop motion film models. Think the forthcoming movie, The Box Trolls, or Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.
With such gorgeously modeled characters in our palette to work with, all of the focus was on the process of creating the stop motion clip. Planning a concept was the easy part. Executing the concept was the tedious learning lesson of what ultimately is lost in the creative process today – patience.
In our highly digitally influenced communications world of today, the idea of patience is lost. On both ends of the client/agency relationship. What should be embraced from both sides is the idea that a little patience can be the ingredient to more effective communications. I understand that "first to market" is a key ingredient to winning in the said marketplace, but "last to communication strategy and execution" deflates a would-be winning campaign.
What we all can do to add a little patience and planning to our jobs to make our creative output stronger and more effective.
Here is the clip - that could have used a little more patience:
