Apologies! Apparently the makers of the short have decided to make their video private, so it’s no longer available to be embedded. If you search for it, there are versions posted on YouTube, but since they don’t come from the legitimate makers of the video, we will not be posting them here.

Check out the behind the scenes video of how they did this.

[via PetaPixel]

For the older group, we tried out a first attempt at life-size stop motion with a group of kids. We had four boys who worked as actors, directors of photography, prop managers, and special effects artists. They came up with a action drama horror comedy extravaganza involving a car crash, parachutes, steamrollers, and roof top skateboarders. That’s a lot of stuff to fit into a fifteen second motion picture!

Tomorrow we’ll post the world premier of The Fast and the Furious 6: Tinkering Drift (working title) and one more stop motion masterpiece as well as a time lapse of these two crazy days. It should be a fun way to end our experiments with the summer camp for this year.

Great idea, brilliant execution. I think there’s something to these large-scale stop-motion animations… Stay tuned for our own experiment coming soon!

After making the world’s smallest stop-motion animation, the fine folks at Sumo Science and Aardman Animation now present the world’s largest: Gulp!

After watching the movie, watch the making-of below, to get a peek into the enormous effort and care that went into making this.

The station was a mess of shavings, twigs, wood chips, bark, and wood veneer, etc., but it was exciting to see what people came up with using the natural materials that we prepared. Here is some examples of our stop motion animation with wood!

The motion is dynamic and it is really fun to watch.

… Does it look like a wild boar?

A bit violent but makes you laugh.

We hope we’ll do more on the floor this month!

We are getting ready for Open Make on this Saturday. Following “plastic” and “cardboard”, the theme for this month is “metal”.

As an ongoing project, Sebastian, Chad, and I have been working on stop-motion animation station, and it is also getting ready for the metal animation. Yesterday, when we were preparing the metallic materials for the animation table, a visitor (a girl from Texas) stopped by and made the first metal animation with us!

I like the washer and nut became an eye, the water surface moving, and the water splashing twice! Can you find a lovely stingray swimming at the bottom and an eel hiding in the sea weeds? I also like there is one little fish turning around and running away from the dropping object.

Come to the Open MAKE: Metal/Wire
March 19, 2011

This movie was made with our new stop motion workstation at its debut at Open Make. Our first animators, Jacob and his dad Jason, used a handful of simple plastic pieces to create two excellent short films, The Great Juggling Disaster and Tennis til Midnight.

It was surprising to me that visitors were able to tell great stories without elaborate props. Many times throughout the day we saw the potential for stop motion to transform simple objects into living creatures with expressions and personalities. Visitors often start by making a character and then make up a narrative as they go along, incorporating the various objects and materials we have provided. The conclusion of the story can be as much of a surprise to its creator as it is to me.

Tennis til Midnight has our two plastic protagonists playing in a changing environment with stop motion rain and clouds.

In the days after open make, we kept trying out different combination of materials to create characters for their movies. On Saturday we brought out a bunch of cardboard food packages and a kit called makedo which allows the parts to be connected in ways that allow different types of motion. Visitors spent a lot of time constructing interesting characters and then usually left them for others to use in their movies later on in the day. After someone asked, I brought out some markers which led to movies having text bubble dialogue and titles announcing the different parts. Here’s a compilation of some of the best movies from the day. I think after watching it, you’ll agree that we need to include the ability to record sound effects and narration.

Here is the “Making of…”. The folks from Aardman do a really good job showing how the movie was made and sharing the challenges of making and filming at this tiny scale. Don’t mind the repetitive Nokia promotion…