As an Easter treat I worked with the CSIRO to develop an egg-themed animation to accompany one of their articles. The article was about their Australian National Wildlife Collection of bird (and reptile) eggs, in which they have over 22,000 clutches from around the country. The concept of the animation was to have the ‘top 7’ eggs from the collection ‘smallest, largest, strangest etc.’ with various facts. The animation is a combination of time-lapse painting of the eggs, and then stop-motion animation of the completed painting.
Here’s a test GIF I did of the stop-motion aspect:
This is actually a piece of paper taped to my desk. It's impossible to tell, but the black object up the top is an amplifier and the one on the right is a lamp base. It's strange to see eggs shifting and wiggling on a piece of paper.
The completed thing took me around 40 hours, much more than anticipated. The painting side of things took the shortest amount of time. I completed the whole painting in two brief sittings. It was the animating and editing afterwards that was the most time consuming
With no legitimate tools, I had to jerry-rig a setup. I had an amp as the base, with various other containers and boxes balanced on top. Then I had my partner’s iPhone (the camera) nestled in an ‘arm’ (tiny display shelf) that craned off the top of the pile of boxes to overlook the artwork.
In this image you can see the base of my contraption. It didn’t even work because it moved every time and resulted in jumpy frames throughout the final video.
All of the animation aspects were done on my iPad — cutting, pasting, and shifting stills of the artwork.
Once finished, I recorded sound effects of aluminium foil and egg shells (manipulated in a program).
Here's the final clip: