Call of Fruity: Pot-O-Problems Animation Challenge

We had to work at night, many nights, on this challenge from the Pot-O-Problems. Our mom bought us the fruit and it went bad fast. So we had to animate at top speed. Learning how to do stop motion animation with produce presented some unique challenges. How to get bananas to fly? How to get a celery stick to be an animated first-person-shooter gun? How to get a scene put together without ruining everything else in the fridge with the doors open.

Making a movie in the kitchen was also tough. We literally had to put plastic wrapping on the kitchen counter to preserve the vegetable from night to night. Having a shrink wrapped counter top is not our mom's idea of functional meal preparation space. By the end the fruit was squishy and rotten. We truly had Zombie fruit.

We are very proud of this movie. We shot the entire thing on an iPad, using our favorite mount proving once again that the mobile revolution is upon us. Movies made on mobile are the future, and the future is here - it's just that not many parents know it yet.

Enjoy!

Bon Animate

Animation Chefs

Pot-O-Problems Challenge Revealed: Godzilla vs Justin Bieber

When we began this movie we had no idea what we were getting into. Our producers wanted everything about this movie to be as unique as possible. We spent half a day in New York City shooting things like Times Square, the Staten Island ferry, Wall Street, and lots and lots of tall buildings. All this footage was for backgrounds.

Once back in our studio, we set up our new green screen and started filming our toy Justin Bieber and our toy Godzilla in stop motion at 15 frames-per-second. One of the most challenging things was getting the Justin Bieber toy doll to look like Justin Bieber. The doll was dated. Justin's haircut is new and different compared to what is on the doll. So we had to give him a haircut. Ever tried shaving hard plastic? Not easy.

Depending on when you see this, our behind-the-scenes look at this whole process is in our members area board in the behind-the-scenes section of our website. This film, between the storyboarding, animation, and the post production took us over 50 hours to complete. It bumped the release of Episode 5 back 2 weeks. Thank you for your patience. Enjoy!

Challenge Revealed: Ninja vs Mini Chef Stop Motion Animation

Here is what we came up with when challenged with random items, i.e. an avocado, ninja outfits, a six-year-old, and an ice cream cone.  This stop motion animation built upon what we have experimented with in lawn-surfing videos. We had to resort to some After Effects animation for a few of the effects, but mostly this was all shot in camera in one afternoon.  We used the aged-film filter in iMovie and the hard light filter too.  We wanted it to look like an old kung fu movie.  The Japanese subtitles are taken directly from Google translator.  We have no idea if they are accurate. We suspect not. If any of you know Japanese, let us know what it actually says.

Challenge Revealed: Unstuck - Animated Wood Guy

Here is our first challenge from the Pot-O-Problems. We were kind of stumped. We tried a lot of different ways to animate these wooden guys. It took trial and error, but we finally figured it out. Look for the Behind-the-scenes on this one. We'll show you how we made it happen. Sometimes the simplest looking animations are the hardest. That was the case here. Enjoy!