Stop Motion Animation

Happy belated New Year! One of my resolutions is not to promise that I'll blog more. There are a lot of stuff I could write about but I choose to be lazy instead.

Anyway, we spent much of the holiday break in Toronto. We visited the Ontario Science Center where we played with stop motion animation in a hands on lab. Jade was really interested in animation and she wanted to do more. I promised her that we could it when we got back to California. When we got back home I looked for a few packages for the Mac and the best one I found was iStopMotion. It's really simple to use (even a 5 year old can use it) and it produces great results. The product has many tiers including a home, prosumer and professional versions. The home version is about $50 and has all the features you need to create stop motion animation. I imported the clips into iMovie for editing and adding the soundtrack.

I experimented with the set up using a crappy Logitech web cam since I didn't have a FireWire cable for my DV camera. Once I figured out how all the pieces fit together, I set up a table top animation studio in the living room. I showed Jade the basics of using the software and let her go. The film above was done mostly by Jade with a little help from me. Jade and I worked on the two characters at the beach but Jade did the other clips herself. Sound track by Buckethead.

Our brightest minds are working on the problem

Idiocracy is a film about an average guy played by Luke Wilson who is genetically frozen in a military experiment. The program is forgotten about and he wakes up 500 years in the future to find that he is the smartest man in the world.

The premise of the film is that society has been dumbed down by the onslaught of commercialism, trashy media and the fact that human evolution no longer favors the survival of the fittest but rather those who can reproduce a lot. Picture a world 500 years into the future in which everything is broken, there is trash everywhere and the dominant cultural aesthetic is a cross between NASCAR and World Wrestling Entertainment.

You either love the film (like me) or hate it (like my wife) but I think the message is that with each generation, our society is dumbing down as smart people fail to reproduce and dumb people breed like rabbits. After seeing the film I see the signs of Idiocracy everywhere.

For instance in the opening montage, the narrator explains that the
brightest scientists of the present day are not engaged in solving the current problems of the world but rather they focus their time and attention on solving male baldness and erectile dysfunction. The scene shows a group of white coated scientists gathered in room measuring the erection of a very long haired baboon. It seems like this prophecy is coming true. I just read that scientists are researching stem cell techniques to stimulate and regenerate hair follicles on the skin of mice. This could eventually lead to baldness cures for men.

Stems cell research has the promise of curing lot of diseases and injuries. It also has the promise of curing baldness and our brightest minds are working on the problem. Welcome to the future!


Picture of Sy Sperling President of Hair Club for men from Worth 1000