Dubi Kaufmann’s Blog

One of my film teachers in college warned the class not to make movies with senseless violence.
violent stop motion animation is to the film major freshman what bad poetry is to the English major. What photos of urban decay are to the first year photography student.
A friend who wanted to learn more about animation came over yesterday with some props and we shot this.

“Follow spot” is a preformance event that takes place every month at i^3 a port production house in Chicago. Last Friday with the help of the audience I made this video.
I found the music at jamendo.com, a site that has a big collection of Creative Commons music.

Eric Bartholomew who was part of the audience filmed this “The making of” video.

From time to time I Invite people over for brunch and besides eating and socializing we do an art project together (It is the art teacher/councilor in me). A week ago it was a large group and we got silly doing stop motion animation.
We used an application called Frame By Frame. What I like about Frame By Frame (besides the price) is that it is easy to use and it works with an external camera. I was also able to easily pull out, retouch and put back some frames that had unwanted details.

It all started with creating an image for BikeSalute.com. I made an image out of the first 267 photos I got. I was emulating the work of Jason Salavon. For the bikesalute image I wrote a little program in processing. Later I rewrote it in actionscript and made it work with flickr sets.

The next step was to make an average out of consecutive frames of a video. Some early tests are here and here. I found out that it looks better if the camera is static. I added the trail to videos from youtube that had a static camera: Example1 , Example2. The next step was to shoot some footage myself.

A guilty pleasure of mine is watching a TV show called “V” on Hulu.
A scene from the lastest episode goes like this.
Alien A: “I can’t do it”
Alien B: “Jesus man, you have to do it”
If they had alien writers on staff the dialogue would have been more believable.

My original plan was completely different. Ambitious as usual. Maybe it was a good idea but not for me. I took the photos with a tripod and the timer in my camera.

I was just reminded that maybe not all of the participants have seen it.

Here are two more videos I have facilitated where we bent space and time.

Having problem with the server that hosts bikesalute.com it could be the mention of the site in the Tribune or it could be a bunch of egotistical hippie cyclists that decided to block the information superhighway just for spite. I hope I can fix the problem soon.

UPDATE.
I’ll be monitoring the server closely and fix it if it happens again.

My Friend Julie and I are organizing this.

Todd Frugia is the man in the video.

At least for three days. I’ll be in Berlin from August 25th to the 27th. Besides visiting the museum (so many!) I plan to take some Bike Salute photos while I am there.
I made a map so, it will be easier to make plans.