Stop-action animation workshop inspires nostalgia

Hans Gindlesberger, right, explores stop-action.

By Katrina Neveri

UW-Parkside students are about as high tech as it gets. Every once in a while, however, it's fun to go retro.  

A number of students participated in a "low-tech" animation workshop Monday, March 5, hosted by artist Hans Gindlesberger. During the session, students were provided printed photos to manually edit, manipulate, and photograph in a process called stop-action animation. Manual editing included copying, pasting, drawing, or erasing the printed image in several steps.

"Each manipulation must be photographed precisely to avoid choppy or misplaced animations, a process that can take hundreds of photos just to get a few seconds of animation," said Gindlesberger.

Students were divided into small work groups to create their own stop-action animations. Photographs used were images of an abandoned town formerly known as Empire, Nevada. After each group finished snapping sequential pictures of their manipulated photos, individual files were compiled to produce a single stop-action film. The resulting short film was titled "Empire Nevada Resurrected" serving as a nostalgic homage to the town that had its zip code revoked by the U.S. Postal Service. The video is now online. 

"I think using stop-action animation is great because students who aren't necessarily computer students have the chance to work with the raw materials to produce animations, rather than using modern 3D rendering software," said UW-Parkside Gallery Director Patricia Briggs.

Gindlesberger's exhibition titled "I'm in the Wrong Film and Other Works" is currently showing in the UW-Parkside Foundation Gallery of the Rita Tallent Picken Regional Center for Arts and Humanities through March 16.

Photo by UW-Parkside student Elmer Golon. 

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ABOUT THIS STORY:

Story Status: Archived
Publish date: 3/6/2012

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