A friend of mine was competing in a 48 Hour film festival, and he asked me to make him an opening video for he and his twin’s film production company called Twinscape Films. They wanted a video that would stand out and set the tone, not only for their competing film, but also for any future projects. After some brainstorming, I decided that a stop motion would be a good fit for the introduction video. To start, I had the twins choreograph a short set of movements for themselves, which I captured using iPhone’s “burst” photo option. Unfortunately, their initial choreography (a piggy back into a final pose) sort of fell through at the end, but I decided to make it work!

After getting the pictures, I used Adobe Illustrator to create “baseline” vector versions of the two by tracing the outlines of their bodies, hair, clothing, etc., excluding facial details. I then made many separate art boards and altered those baseline vectors to match their pose in each of the photos. Once I had each shot traced, I added a yellow background and some text to each slide that would appear chronologically and simultaneously with the progression of the photos to spell out “Twinscape Films”. The little mishap they had in their choreography allowed me to bring the video to an end in a funny and personable way.

Finally, I used iMovie to compile all of the photos in order and set each photo to display for about 0.1 seconds so it would flow smoothly. As a final touch, I added a type writing sound effect to play with the appearance of each letter in the progression of photos. The entire process took me about 12 hours of non-stop work, but it is to this day one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever created.