For this project I knew that I wanted to do stop motion animation. I knew that it would take a lot of time and effort, but it was something I have always been interested in doing. I have done some small stop motion animation projects, but nothing of this magnitude. After being introduced to the work of Martha Colburn I became even more inspired to create a video using this technique.

I chose to narrate and animate a story written by Dani Atkinson called Said the Princess. It is such a unique story in so many ways. One being that it twists the idea of a fairytale story in which the princess must be saved by the prince. In this case the princess is not the typical damsel in distress. In this story the damsel is in distress only because she realizes that the villain expects the prince to save her. She claims that she knows the prince won’t be able to save her and that he was probably trapped somewhere and needed her to save him. The princess addresses the flaws of the prince, but loves him anyways. She is motivated to escape her predicament in order to rescue the prince. Although you don’t see much of the prince he is also very different from the usual fairytale prince. He is not perfect and that is addressed blatantly in the story. He is physically unable to save the princess and instead is the one who needs the saving. These aspects hint at feminist themes. By saying and showing that women don’t always need to be saved, men can also be in the position of a lad in distress. It also doesn’t try to imply that the prince is any less of a man because he is unsuccessful at rescuing the princess or that he is the one in need of rescue.

Another unique aspect of this story is that the protagonist, the princess, can hear the narrator. The narrator and the princess go through a slightly awkward situation. The narrator claims to only be a voice, the princess copes with the fact that she can hear this strange voice, The narrator is omniscient, so being able to hear the narrator helps the princess learn about her captivity, her captor and how to escape. In this situation the princess and the narrator often conversate in between the narrator’s descriptions of the princess’s activities.

After creating this video I realized how difficult it is to do stop motion animation. I have so much respect for those who can make full length movies at 30 framse per second. In this video there are not 30 frames per second, but way less than that. If I were to do a 5 minute stop motion animation with 30 frames for second I would need 9000 frames to create the movie. It took so much time, effort and patence in order to complete the video. The taking of the photos were fun yet time consuming, The most difficult part would have to be the editting though. In the video, speech is animated. It took a lot of time to correctly match up the mouth shapes to the audio that it was supposed to produce.

My idea for this project was to record phone calls that I recieved from my friends that were walking home alone at night. Usually when girls walk home at night they feel unsafe, so they will phone a friend to keep them company. I asked my friends to describe to me everything that they see. This will give us a sense of scenery and let us experience the location without being there physically.I origianlly wanted to have 3 different conversations with 3 different people, but the app that I was using to record phone conversations malfunctioned. I was only able to salvage one complete phone call.

The theme of my project was how people spend so much time trying to get the “right angle” that they don’t enjoy the moment. I made a polaroid frame and asked two of my friends if they would reenact some of their favorite memories for me. In order to emphasize my point of focusing on what is happening in front of oneself I made sure that my phone’s camera focus was on the polaroid frame rather than the humans in the picture. If you look at the photos you get a general idea of what is going on in the photo, but without the focus or the context you can not fully grasp the situation.

I posted these photos on Instagram because it is a photo oriented social media platform and people generally put a lot of time into what photos they post on Instagram. All of my photos I posted recieved likes, but none of them recieved a big response in the comments. The comments were more along the lines of “cool picture” or “nice idea”.