iStopMotion for Students
Jess Riegel
Jess Riegel is 19 years old, and attends the University of California, Santa Barbara.
"I have been experimenting with animation since middle school, but I was always hindered by a lack of good equipment. I originally used our family analog video camera and the advanced technique of "pressing start and stop record as fast as possible."
In high school, I finally bought a cheap consumer mini-DV camera, and was able to use Adobe Premiere's stop-motion feature to capture frames one at a time. However, this process had hardly any control other than a single button to save each frame.
I finally switched to Mac last summer (2006), and began to explore stop-motion programs on the OS X platform. Almost immediately I found iStopMotion and fell in love. The level of control, ease of use, and sheer performance of the program makes the computer-side of stop-motion filmmaking a joy!
My latest stop-motion work is a music video done to a song by the band Poo Poodles. The piece follows a pair of bananas that are on a mission to get to the beach. I think my favorite part of the film is the end credit sequence.
I really don't like super-tedious, slow processes, that usually are a part of making an animation. When I do stop-motion, I do it as fast as possible by keeping simple, and trying to get in a rhythm. By keeping it face-paced, everything is more spontaneous and in a few hours I can produce a couple minutes instead of a couple seconds.
Watch Jess's stop motion music video "Bananas":
And his latest funny short:
You can find out more about Jess at his website.
