Stop-motion Animation

Bless You

2020 Zippers, Paper cut, Stop-motion Animation

fig.81 Stephanie is doing demo.

fig.82 My zippers. Bless you, the first culture shock I’ve experienced after I came to the US. Coincidently, my partner Em is the only one student who would say “bless you” after other people sneezing.

I bought a bunch of zippers for the sewing project last semester, but I didn’t use them. For not wasting these materials, I planned to make a stop-motion animation by zippers!

fig.83 Stop-motion working space.

I have animation background, so it was not quite a challenge for me to make animation. I really appreciate Kim and Stephanie’s effort to offer us a set of professional and efficient equipment. Without them, we can’t make it in only one day.

We’ve tried different materials: sand, acrylic, pastel, papercutting... I enjoyed sand the most, because it is perfect to express the random and abstract shapes, also the delicate sketches.

Working with Em was a surprising experience. I didn’t know her well before the workshop. We both work very fast, and I became the “math” person counting the frames all the time. We didn’t have full plans for the whole animation, and basically we just worked intuitively and let new ideas came up naturally. It was good and bad – we were the last group who left the studio.

fig.84 My partner Em.

fig.85 I’m painting.

fig.86 My hand in Dragonframe!

fig.87 A frame of my animation.

The animation shows intercultural reaction to sneeze. We turned the zippers into people, tree, door, elevator... I wanted the audience wandering in multiple space, so I spend lots of time editing the sound.

An unexpected outcome was that when I showed my animation to my friends in China, they associated it with the COVID-19 in Wuhan. It was not a international pandemic at that time (Feburary 9th), the feedback was totally difference between my classmates in the US and my Chinese friends. If

fig.88 Scan the QR code and watch it on Vimeo.

fig.89 A frame of my animation.

fig.90 My sound art teacher Andrew Keiper in ILP! we see it in pandemic view, it is not lighthearted, playful anymore – it’s serious.

I invited my teacher in “sound design for animation” class – Andrew Keiper to hold a sound workshop for ILP. We planed this collaboration in the early last semester, and it was so nice to see him in ILP workshop! Hope it will benefit our classmates.