With over 12,000 pieces of construction paper, a beautiful vision, and lots of patience, director Erez Horovitz and his animation team of almost twenty people have produced a captivating 4 minute stop-motion animation that will leave you smiling and whistling. This short music video featuring Josh Ritter’s (voted by Paste Magazine as one of the top 100 living songwriters) song of the same title tells the captivating story of a man leaving the country for the city, falling in love, and… you guessed it… “making his way back home” to the country to settle down.
After 6 weeks of plotting the story and animating it in After Affects, the team decided to go with the strata-cut technique and began laser cutting the 12,000 cutouts. According to concept developer, Sam Cohen,
The final stage was photographing – good old stop-motion animation done at 15 frames per second. The frames were hung vertically from hooks in 23 rows, row 1 being closest to the camera, row 23 farthest away. The rig was setup in our makeshift cave of thick black blankets hung from the ceiling to keep out all light. The paper scenes were then lit from the front and below, and photographed with a digital still camera on a tripod. Each photo is viewed for 1/15th of a second and each cutout represents one layer within a frame. A single frame could have anywhere from 2-100 layers, with a setup time of 20 seconds to 5 minutes. Shooting took a full week of mostly sleepless nights, and Erez holds the record with 5 all-nighters in a row.
This labor of “love” is certainly worth every sleepless night. For more information on how this fascinating film was created, check out Ritter’s website. And be sure to check out more films in Erez Horovitz’ collection.
Spoiler Alert:
See the world through this man’s construction paper wind shield as he travels through pine tree forests, meeting a deer friend along the way who you can’t help but make you bounce along. His voyage brings him to a city full of life, where he finds a partner who turns his black and white world into one that is bright and colorful, and he keeps it that way as they travel together back to his country home together.
[...] Vía: Visual News [...]