Wonderful Motion

Thursday May 12th, 2011

by Paul Stanek

You’re right, Mr. Dylan, the times they are a-changin’. As of late, there’s been an undeniable trend of commercial photographers, well-versed in the art of the still image, moving into the realm of motion. We here at Wonderful Machine are thrilled about our growing roster of motion photographers in the USA and internationally, and are doing everything we can to make sure we’re at the top of our game for them.

One move we’ve made is to start a Wonderful Machine Vimeo channel. If you’re working in motion, you may already be familiar with Vimeo, and its reputation for cleanly compressing HD footage into streaming video. We’re rolling out our channel with a contribution of our own, The Portfolio Edit: Sean Stone Style.

The original concept for this piece was a sort of “kill two birds with one stone (or Stone)” scenario: we wanted a project that would introduce some of my animation capabilities and familiarity with the world of motion, and at the same time highlight the increasingly popular portfolio editing skills of our director of photography, Sean Stone. We came up with a playful stop motion piece highlighting Sean’s edit of Scott Suchman‘s portfolio.

To produce the video, we used a Canon 5D Mark II to capture thousands of still images of Sean doing his thing, and then assembled the frames into video in Adobe After Effects CS5. I chose to work in After Effects over an editing program like Final Cut Pro because I also wanted to add some composite “visual accents” to the piece that I knew AE would be most conducive to. In addition, I was going to add titles and informative slides, and I love what After Effects can do with text.

Then came the soundtrack. I wanted to build the music around a fun instrument, and I can think of few instruments as fun as the ukulele. I recorded some samples of the very talented Annachristie Sadler of Sisters3 (who also happens to be my girlfriend) strumming her ukulele, brought those samples into Propellerhead Reason 5, and produced the rest of the track there.

If you’re interested in sharing your motion work on the Wonderful Machine Vimeo channel, you can contact me at paul@wonderfulmachine.com. Also, if you have a motion project in mind and would like some guidance or assistance—production, compression tips, narrative arc advice, sound design, title creation, you name it—please email me or give me a call.

Check out Sean’s handiwork in Scott’s finished portfolio here: