The last post told how our then eight year-old daughter was able to make a stop-motion animation story, Molly’s Family, using her wooden dolls house and a video camera I’d borrowed from work. Our next attempt was more sophisticated, with sound effects and a few facial movements. It was also a better story.
For now forgotten reasons, she had two almost identical sets of figures for her dolls house. The story came from that.
For so many years, she did not want these videos to be seen. She was embarrassed by her voice. At school she was called ‘posh’ because her accent was not as strongly Yorkshire as most of the others’. Now, her Yorkshire accent is all she hears.
Here is the second video, Molly’s Twin, with mums resting and drinking tea, and dads spending all their time playing on the computer.
One of the perks of working in a university is that you get to play with the latest bits of kit.
I was asked to get involved in one of the new multimedia courses springing up around the U.K. in the mid nineteen-nineties. Surprisingly, many were in engineering departments. I believe the first was started by engineers at Bradford University around 1993.
One element of our new course was digital video. We were all encouraged to understand how it worked. As a result I was allowed to borrow one of our new hand-held video cameras and take it home. It was great fun filming our children when little, playing in an inflatable dinghy in the natural pool on the beach at Sandsend.
I know that sounds like a frivolous waste of taxpayers’ money, but we needed to know how to use these new technologies ourselves, and understand how they might relate to other parts of the course and what their possibilities might be. Silicon Valley technology companies often allow staff time to ‘play’ with new software and equipment because it generates innovative ideas. In our case, it led to course developments and research funding.
Handling a video on a computer was not straightforward then. You had to run it through programs to digitise and ‘render’ it into a viewable form. You needed to be aware of the type of video coding (‘codec’) you were using. Only then could you begin to edit it or write programs to do state-of-the-art clever things such as spotting objects and faces. There would be a lot of ‘re-rendering’. Computers were so slow that every stage took ages. Nothing was automatic and effortless like now.
Back home, I realised that the camera made it easy to create stop-motion animation. With my then eight year-old daughter’s lovely wooden dolls’ house, the figures that went with it, and her enthusiasm and child’s take on family life around her, this, below, was one of our first attempts. Yet another example of something that would be much easier with today’s software. You wouldn’t even need a real dolls house. I know which I think the most fun.
She made up most of the story and moved the figures, while I mainly operated the camera. Surely, the story is not based on her own family, is it?
