Lomography

Tipster of the Week: Fashion is for Fashion People
written by scapegoat on October 18th, 2009 , 21 comments (19 votes)

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Holgamation by hansie14

So, I was thinking what else I could do with my lovely lovely Holga and I thought I’d give stop frame animation a go. Yes, it will gonna take a lot of time, film and effort but why not give it a try!

To save on money I thought it would be best to use 35mm film as this is much cheaper to both buy and get processed. I also set up a mask on my Holga so that I could get more pictures from one film. I also thought that as this exposes over the sprockets then having it longer and thinner that way would add to the ‘filmic’ effect of the finished product.

So the Holga is ready to go, (remembering to tape over the window on the back!) now I needed to figure out how far to wind on to be able to get the individual frames out of my ready loaded 35mm film. I did a test roll and from that I figured that about a half a turn was enough to give me enough space between frames, so I put my handy little marker arrow on the top of the winder. And I’m ready to shoot! I think having a very patient friend is definitely a big plus if you’re thinking of doing something like this! My friend was happy to be dressed up and move around super slowly like he was stuck in glue or something. I chose to make him do fairly simply movements like shaking his head or moving his hat as I wasn’t sure how well these shots would come out.

Well, it was all going pretty well but then came the problem of getting the 35mm film out of the Holga without exposing it to the light. To get around this I made a changing bag using blackout blind material which is super dark. It was big enough to get the Holga and both of my hands into with a bit of space to maneuver around for the fiddly bit of getting the film out. So, new film in I can start shooting again.

Another majorly important bit of kit was the tripod I used. This helped me ensure that the shots were consistent, well as much as they could be! Maybe if you’re sure of how steady your hand is then you could get away without the tripod. I also took along a bit of chalk so that if we wanted a break then we could draw around my friend’s feet and the tripod so that we knew where to get back to when we went back to shooting.

I used 5/6 films and ended up with around 300 individual frames which I then cropped and saved as targas. To turn it from individual frames into the animation I used AfterEffects and set it to 8 frames per second, mainly so that my frames would go further! I’m sure you could use another program but that’s the one that I had.

So yeah, I’m really pleased with how it came out!