That Thing That Happened One Time (2003) - This short stop motion animated film was produced at the end of a one week workshop taught by stop motion animator Jim Blashfield, who worked some famous music videos including Michael Jackson's "Leave me Alone," and The Talking Heads "And She Was."

This is another case where I essentially directed a video, but was a afraid to take credit for it. I came up with the story, storyboarded, and directed the action in the video. I also appear as the artist who draws the character who gets up off the page. This video had about a day's worth of time for production, and was one of two videos made in the class with a complete story.

I made the armature for the paper character with twist ties, which were glued between the illustration, and a second sheet of paper for the back. In some shots you can almost see the skeletal structure when the lighting is right. flattened balls of clay beneath the feat were used to keep the character in place. When I showed Mr. Blashfield the character with the armature in it, his eyes bugged out with a look of startled exclamation.

Ben Hickman acted largely as director of photography, setting up most of the shots and the lighting for the video overall. All three of us, Ben, Kim Premore, and myself took turns doing the physical animation at my direction, and each of us animated some hand drawn animation element. I drew the character who gets up off the page, Kim drew the girl, and Ben drew the boat.

The most complex shots were the over the shoulder shots, where, for the depth of field to be right, the paper character had to be placed back from the images he was looking at on a stack of books several feet away and up from the images, and the camera placed behind that. Then in each frame the drawings he was looking at had to be changed to animate the motion in them, and a subtle shift had to be made to the camera's focus to shift it from the character to the subject material, in addition there were slight adjustments to the character to indicate he was looking at something. This was one of the few shots I set up myself.

Ben came up with a way to animate the character falling off the side of the drawing table, since it would be unintentionally disjointed if we cut from the animated motion to footage of the character actually falling for real. He anchored the character to the side of the drawing table and slowly moved it down, frame by frame, until the shot was completed.

With the short timeframe, and having never done stop motion animation before that workshop, I think we did rather well.

Click on one of the links below to view this video.
High Quality (13mb)
Lower Quality (3.8mb)

Click here to return to the segments menu.