Creating the Misunderstanding

We all know the feeling. It's usually when your sitting in your room, your office, or in the bathroom (the last is not recommended). It is the feeling of boredom. You ask yourself what you're going to do over and over, and nothing comes to you. Then, an idea starts to tickle your brain, and you decide to give it a go, you don't have anything else to do.

This phenomenon happened to me on Sunday, the day you usually feel bored on unless it is football season. The only things I knew that were going to be in the video when I dumped out my Legos were the opening sequence and the end. I made the sets and started shooting.

In stop motion videos, one second of action is 16 pictures, so the three minute song seemed like three hours when I started. When I finished the opening sequence, ideas kept coming to me. They seemed so good at the time that even my cat, Teddy, was agreeing with me on some. That's when I started talking to him.

"Get your tail out of the picture, Cat!" and, "Stop chewing on Batman!" Were some of the things that I said to Teddy throughout filming. In case you don't know, Teddy loves to chew on Legos. To the Lego world, Teddy is a deranged monster who can attack at any time. Anyway, I had a hard time filming when Teddy was in the room, he even took MiniPhil hostage once. After that crisis was averted, and Teddy was thrown out of my room, it was time for dinner.

The second day of filming began with Zurg staring at me. I knew what he wanted, he knew what he wanted. I put him in the movie. I uploaded my pictures four times in the computer, to see where I was at in the song that day. Then, just before dinner, I ran out of ideas. When faced with this situation, DO NOT panic. It's like a kidney stone, it passes in time.

The next morning, I had the rest of the video thought out, and couldn't wait to start filming. The third day of filming went by so quick, I didn't know what to do. Of course I knew it was time to start editing, which didn't take long. The hard part was moving my desk lamp without getting third degree burns.

The fact is, I got lucky. The actions matched up with the verses almost exactly the way I wanted them to. It's hit or miss when you try to match actions with music. Either you're right on it, or it's completely off. Stop motion is one of the easiest forms of film making, but it is also one of the most time consuming. If you can do one thing for long periods of time, then you can probably do stop motion. All you need is an idea.