My Paper Mind

February 24, 2008 10:08 AM

My Paper Mind is a 44 second animation created by Javan Ivey using his stratastencil technique.
posted by gwint (15 comments total)

Wow, that's really labor-intensive. I did some hand animation in college, just markers on paper, and even that requires a touch of OCD. Cutting out all the frames by hand would be even more work, not to mention the time it then takes to capture all the frames hung up just so on a rail. 12-15 frames a second (a typical rate for hand animation) is 528-660 frames for the 44 seconds we just saw.
posted by echo target at 10:26 AM on February 24, 2008

That is really lovely
posted by ZippityBuddha at 10:36 AM on February 24, 2008

Wow, that was pretty amazing. Goes to show that some people are really focused. In the time it took him to make that, I would have started and stopped about 10 projects. My attention span is not much to speak of.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 12:28 PM on February 24, 2008

That was wonderful.
posted by flatluigi at 1:09 PM on February 24, 2008

Very nice! A lot of work ...
posted by carter at 1:19 PM on February 24, 2008

That is an insane amount of work.
posted by danb at 2:00 PM on February 24, 2008

MaryDellamorte—I would've cracked up if you just ended the last sentence at "not".
posted by disillusioned at 2:08 PM on February 24, 2008

Damn. Nice. I've still got the papers from some of my marker-and-paper animations, and yeah, I had somewhere around thousand pages of paper for an animation a little longer than a minute - and that was by no means perfectly smooth animation. But sketching stuff in sharpie's easier than cutting scenes out of cardstock, by far.
posted by ubersturm at 2:31 PM on February 24, 2008

In the time it took him to make that, I would have started and stopped about 10 projects. My attention span is not much to speak of.
posted by MaryDellamorte

That's exactly what I thought. My mind wanders to much. I have a hard time finishing anyt
posted by The Deej at 2:42 PM on February 24, 2008

The stop animation "making of" video on his website is almost as interesting as the result.

My favorite part is when after 12 hours or so of the 18 hours he spent cutting and assembling... he needed his glasses. I laughed.
posted by rokusan at 4:52 PM on February 24, 2008

...I'd assumed they were laser-cut pages. All the more impressive — and, somehow, more "artistic" — that he was looney enough to do it all by hand.

I don't know why I didn't assume it was computer animation. One could pull off a perfectly good version of the same idea without cutting up several reams of paper; no one would ever be the wiser.
posted by five fresh fish at 5:51 PM on February 24, 2008

fff, I saw the work in process, and I suspect that everyone would be the wiser had it not been made by hand. It would not look at all special or interesting that way. That's the real beauty of it. Vive la difference!
posted by gorgor_balabala at 7:24 PM on February 24, 2008

yow...impressive.
posted by dan g. at 8:10 PM on February 24, 2008

My goodness, that looked like hard work.
posted by Corduroy at 9:06 PM on February 24, 2008

I'd like to have a go at this myself but I don't think I'm cut out for it somehow.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 2:07 AM on February 25, 2008