I’ve been watching a lot of stop motion recently (The Fantastic Mr. Fox; Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer; The Nightmare Before Christmas) and I’ve been wondering: Why not?
I’ve had an idea of animating one of those wooden drawing mannequins for the last few days, so today my brother and I went to Island Blue Print to get one.
“Did you want a male or female?” the clerk helped.
“Oh, I didn’t realize they were gendered.”
I was thinking of getting one, learning to animate it, then stepping up to a second. I wanted one of each, however the males came in 6″ and the females only in 12″ — and I wanted to keep things relatively small for close-in shooting.
A female mannequin, I reasoned, would be good, tho large, for a solo dance routine but — but! — a pair of male dolls could fight, and I could photograph them still to screen-test them with vaguely-interesting results. I started to pull two 6″ males from the shelves.
“Why don’t you just get one,” brother Boo brillianted, “and clone it in Photoshop?”
So here are the two poorly-focused, poorly-posed photos I took to do just that, and the resulting composite. The third image was made solely with the clone tool, which I used to edit in the doll, its shadow, and edit out the stands and my hand (click to lightbox).
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- Torre performing a kick.
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- Uke receives the kick.
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- The kick (sans balance-posts).
Lots of improvements to be made in future (posing, focus, cloning experience, probably a matte background). But there you have it, eh what?
Construction of the final image was inspired by this photograph, taken and spliced for the September 2007 issue of Vogue, as documented in The September Issue.
Tags: Movies, Photography, Stop Motion