Stop Motion Fireworks and EQD felt competition win

Woot. I just won the Equestria Daily felt competition Contest page with other entrants with this.

Its a stop motion gif I made using construction paper.

I spent hours cutting out little pieces of paper and trying to make them look as show accurate as possible. I even made some of the swirly squiggles that you can see on the ground and plants but decided to stick with the simpler squiggles to not distract too much from everything else in the scene. The tools were simply paper, glue, tape and a pair of scissors.


Now to make my camera holder, I fashioned up a horrible mess but it worked for the most part.

I still dont know whether to be ashamed of this or proud that such an idea worked

That is two computer towers hooked together by an overgrown Ipod cord using a piece of string and a carabiner. I was able to string the cord across six times and used four underneath to hold the camera up and two on top to help stabilize it. This really only kept the camera at the right height so I had to be extra careful taking pictures because the angle and positioning was very easy to mess up. To help fight this I took at least three pictures for each frame of my animation then picked the one that was closest to the frame before it and wasn't completely blurry. I guess the blurriness didn't matter too much since turning it into a gif destroyed the quality alot but it also made the mistakes less obvious.

Original photo quality

Now to make the animation I looked at the Trixie firework scene and saw that little balls were used to great effect for a few of her fireworks. This was my inspiration to how to do the fireworks instead of doing long thin strips of paper as was my original plan. For the front big yellow pieces (shown above) I pasted little white circles on top to give them a sense of burning bright. Same with the dark pink circles used in the heart except a lighter pink was used instead of white. Also to give some sense of bursting fireworks I used a lamp to help light up the sky when they exploded. I moved it close with a piece of paper dimming it for the frame when it first started bursting then took the paper off for the next few frames. Finally I put the paper back on and moved it away eventually turning it off when the firework started disappearing.

Now for the movement. I had glued most of the background pieces down as I know how clumsy I can be and only had the ponies left mobile besides the fireworks themselves. I found myself often picking up multiple dots in my attempt to move one so I used the backside of a pencil to fix this problem. It was precise enough and I had one so thats all the reasoning I needed to use it. I would go around in a circle making sure I knew which one I moved first and move all the dots outward one at a time. This part actually was not very time consuming or as stressful as trying to take the picture or cutting out my ponies and house had been. About half way through though I accidentally breathed.  Not a cough or sneeze or long sigh just a breath that somehow blew my entire firework display away. Somehow I was able to reconstruct it using the review function on my camera to see how the previous frame had looked. It was difficult to make out since I had cords covering up the viewer but I somehow got it to work.

All in all it was a fun experience. I tried redoing the gif after winning by skewing some of the photos to make the shaking less apparent but while it made the fireworks look better. Twilight and Pinkie looked like they were vibrating x__x  so no redoing of the gif. Anyway its another art form I am glad to have tried even if I did not have the equipment or time to perfect it.