the work documented in this post has gratuitous use of the middle finger. discretion advised I guess.
With my partner, Sarah Liriano, I shot a stop motion animation, set to Oliver Nelson’s Reuben’s Rondo. In it, my character struggles with his anthropomorphized middle finger, after being jostled by a colleague. Though the tone of the animation is light, I intended this piece to be a physical representation of the struggles individuals with obsessive-compulsive, mood, and pervasive-thought disorders may face in their day-to-day life.
We ended up using Dragonframe software and a Canon EOS Mark 3 camera to collect and stitch our stop motion images. I had anticipated how time-intensive the process of shooting the animation would be; approximately 5 hours in total. We planned well in ahead, writing our storyboard before the day we decided to shoot. However, because we neglected to mark up my finger in the shooting phase, editing the middle finger face (which Sarah created in Adobe Illustrator) required tedious, manual, frame by frame adjustment to overlay with my finger.