Stop motion is cool

As I’d written about back in earlier days of isolation, I’m trying out making some stop motion videos.

It’s been a while since I took a crack at another one, in part because I wasn’t able to come up with more than a handful of ideas lo these many months, and in part because I pushed the ideas away thinking they weren’t worth the bother.
(Whether or not they were we may never know, but always bear in mind, kids: Creative ideas shouldn’t be readily ignored but more often tried out and explored. There’s an argument to be made that doing so with new ideas and creative outlets cannot, by its very nature, be time wasted.)

In any case, I was noticing recently when in the basement bathroom that a section of shower hose I replaced recently could, with a bit of effort, be made to look and move like a stop motion snake. That, my brain knew immediately, was something I wanted to try out.

My first idea, of having it slither out of the tub, couldn’t work due to my inability to get the “head” of it effectively edging over the tub. It would’ve taken some tape and maybe some skewers to get it to stay upright, and it was just getting complicated.

So, scratch that.

But I still liked the idea of the hose moving like a snake.

Which led to my second idea for it: What if, instead of trying to get it to move vertically, I instead shot the video from overhead, thereby letting it move (relatively) “up” and “down” more freely, in a 2D sense.

To keep the camera (okay, phone) still, I cobbled together a makeshift rigging out of a laundry drying rack to suspend it overhead. It took some tweaking to get the angle right, but it was finally ready.

As I was shooting down onto the tub’s bath mat, it occurred to me how soft and fluffy it was. What use might a creature have for such a discovery?

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I encourage you to turn up your volume and enjoy the world premiere of…