I had fun with this shot of the horses’ eyes moving. The blue horse needed to have rapidly moving eyes because he was a human a second ago and now he’s a horse, so he’s pretty freaked out. The make that the focus of the shot, I decided the red horse’s eyes could move more calmly. So my first instinct was to have the blue eye go directly from one side to the other without any frames in between, while the red eye takes several frames to move the same distance. The result was that the blue was moving waaaaay to fast and looked bizarre. So, since I was shooting on twos, I decided that each frame of the blue eye would be held for four frames, while each frame of the red eye was held for two. So I moved the red eye every two frames and moved the blue eye every four frames. However, this still looked a bit mechanical, and I wanted to make them more out of sync with each other. Partly for the project, partly because it was getting too easy and I fancied a challenge. So to do that, I held the starting position of both eyes for three frames, then moved the red eye on the fourth frame. This meant, on the fifth frame, the red eye was being held a frame while the blue eye was making its first movement. And on it went, until I had about 1.5 seconds of footage altogether, having to keep count of the frames for each eye separately. I suppose that kind of stuff is just baby steps for a stop motion animator, but I find is strangely satisfying to figure out.

One thing I didn’t give enough attention to with the last few stop motion clips I made was the lighting. That was partly due to feeling rushed with the deadline coming up, but is also a habit of mine where I get a kind of tunnel vision on the thing I’m most interested in (generally the actual animating) and I ignore the other details. The plus side of this is that I get into a zone where I work for ages and don’t notice the time passing and I make interesting things BUT there is an obvious downside which is that I make mistakes or forget things and the work doesn’t come out as good as I’d hoped. Going forward, I think I just need to slow down, maybe make a list of all the things to think about before I go into something while my head’s clear, and then maybe those little mistakes will happen less.