Works in progress.
I’m just a girl, standing in front of her hobby, asking why i spend so much time on it.
I’m not a builder, but its Quarantine Times so I’m trying all kinds of new shit. This is my first attempt at a Stop Motion Build and its um…rough? Ha. But it was fun.
You may or may not know, but I have ADHD which means that I am constantly wrangling my brain into submission over things like time management and organization. The weird thing about quarantine and working from home (forever? lol) is that I can arrange my day to better suit how my brain works.
I’m actually more productive (whatever that means).
What does this have to do with a stop motion build? Well, it’s simple:
Stop motion builds are incredibly labor intensive.
You have to build the thing, then dismantle it backwards while taking a screenshot after removing each object. You’ve got to shoot all the camera transitions, arrange the clips in reverse order and edit it together (if you want a good tutorial, I started here). It’s a stupid, stupid amount of work and my brain LOVES it.
Sometimes, after an entire day of forcing myself to manage to-do lists, answer emails, plan, prioritize, and whole bunch of executive functioning level tasks that feel natural for some people but for me, are like pushing a boulder uphill with heels on—my brain just wants to dig in on a very detailed-oriented, time-consuming nonsense task.
Literally. I am happy to sit there for hours with music on, doing this work because the world fades away. My brain finally unclenches and when I’ve come out of the zone 87.392 hours later, I’m relaxed and I feel like I can take on the world again.
Amen to the productivity thing. I’m lucky enough to already be working with people who understand that my prime work hours are 7 PM–3 AM, and am glad the freedom is also benefitting you. Sounds meditative! I recently read that trying to push through brain-no-work time is like trying to start a car with no gas, and if stop-motion building gives you gas (hahaha I am 12), hell yes!
I don’t watch a lot of these, but if it helps you to know, I cranked the video to 2x speed and would have gone higher (probably 8x) if Youtube let me.
It does! I’ve been working on a second one and I think I’ve got the speed down a little better. I didn’t realize how to change the speed on multiple clips in imovie when I made this one so I just gave up lol.
Yes to working the way your brain wants/needs! Whew, and the no gas thing…I mean I’m cackling because I’m immature too but also I struggle with this so much. My temptation is always to push myself. And the start of this particular fall is ROUGH. Yeah, detailed building projects keeping me sane.
HA.
Oh man this convo just revealed to me why writing these past two chapters has been so hard. MY BRAIN TIRED. BRAIN NEED BREAK.