6 Stop Motion

 

When I first began thinking about this project, I immediately knew I wanted to use my wooden horse manikin and manipulate its legs to simulate motion. I was drawn to the tactile, handmade quality of stop motion, so incorporating crafted elements felt essential. To build on that, I created a paper puppet of a jockey to ride the horse. The puppet was constructed so that it could also be manipulated, and I used round-head fasteners to allow the limbs to move fluidly with the horse’s motion.

To achieve realistic movement, I referenced The Horse in Motion, a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge that captures a racehorse frame by frame. Using these sequential images as a guide, I carefully adjusted the horse’s body to replicate natural galloping motion. As I repositioned the horse for each frame, I also subtly adjusted the jockey to enhance the illusion of movement and interaction. To strengthen the narrative element of the film, I decided to have the jockey dramatically fall mid-race.

Sound became a crucial component of the final piece. In GarageBand, I layered and manipulated several audio elements: recordings of galloping horses, the track “First Call” song, and race commentators reacting to a jockey falling, followed by the sound of sirens. I altered the tempo and layered these sounds add to the sense of the environment as well as the emotional impact. The addition of sound significantly deepened the narrative and brought the stop motion to life.

Challenges and Problem-Solving

Several technical challenges arose during the process. Because I inverted Muybridge’s photographs to match the direction of my model horse, the resulting animation initially made the horse appear to run backward. To correct this, I reversed the video in post-production.

Another challenge was timing. I found that the animation needed to run at a much faster speed than I had anticipated in order to convincingly simulate a gallop. To extend the duration of the piece, I looped a portion of the footage, which helped maintain momentum without disrupting continuity.

Working at home with a makeshift setup also presented obstacles. My phone was mounted to the leg of a chair using the forward-facing camera, which made it difficult to clearly see the frames I was capturing. As a result, my knee and hair accidentally appeared in several shots. I carefully corrected these mistakes by going into each affected frame individually and using Canva’s Magic Eraser tool to remove the distractions, then reinserting the edited images back into the sequence.

Set up