I have always been fascinated by animation. Growing up, animated movies have always been, in my opinion, one of the more entertaining and emotionally-driven avenues of entertainment. Pixar movies like Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Up were (and still are) some of my personal favorites.
One movie stands out to me in particular, because it is frankly quite terrifying. For my birthday in 2009, I went to the movie theater to see Coraline with my family. And let me tell you, I definitely had some vivid nightmares after watching it. Horrible dreams where I was afraid that someone would remove my eyes and replace them with little buttons. 11 years later, I'm not scared (as much) by the movie, but rather I have such a profound appreciation for the work that went into that movie. The process of creating a stop-motion film, I now realize, is extremely time-consuming, and I couldn't even fathom just how long it would take to do something like that.
Couldn't.
For my Maker Project, I decided to see just how long it would take to make a little stop-motion film.
There were two questions to considered early in this process:
What film would I make?
How would I make the film?
I knew the answer to the first question almost immediately. Season 4, Episode 11 of award-winning show "Parks and Recreation." Ben Wyatt, who had recently resigned from his position as Assistant City Manager, took up claymation as one of his hobbies. And he creates this lovely film called "Requiem for a Tuesday."
I keep coming back to this YouTube video whenever I need a pick-me-up, because it is hilarious. One of my personal favorites in the entire show. But it really shows how much work you can put into something. And I happen to think that Ben's work is incredibly admirable, because you can tell just how passionate he is about it.
So I decided to recreate Ben's short film titled "Requiem for a Tuesday."
Now, I had to consider how I would make it. Would it be an exact recreation of it, using clay and a camera? Would it be a series of hand drawings? Could I model in some sort of 3D simulator? I thought of various ways to do this, but I settled on something that I felt comfortable with and that I felt like I could optimize.
I decided to make the animation entirely through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
Making this project consisted of the following major steps:
screenshotting the source material to sizable to make frames that I could recreate in Excel,
converting the screenshots into pixelated images,
retrieving and inputting the hex codes corresponding with those pixels in each frame,
converting the hex codes into colors,
putting all the frames together to create the finished project.
The video above wasn't the best for
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This was, by far, the most tedious part of the entire project.
This step probably took 2 days at most. In contrast, Step 3 probably took me a 3-4 weeks. The reason why? Converting the hex codes into colors can be done exclusively in Excel. (Step 3 involved switching back and forth between two different programs.) But the real time-saver was AutoHotKeys. For those of you who don't know, AutoHotKeys is a scripting language that allows you to automate processes.
I figured out the keyboard shortcuts necessary to take the hex codes in each cell and make that specific cell the color corresponding to that hex code. Then, I made a simple program that repeated the same keyboard strokes over and over again. The following is what that script looks like.
^w:: Send,^c!hhm{Right down}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}{Tab down}{Tab up}^v{Enter down}{Enter up}{Down down}{Down up}
That's it. This is the foundation of the code that saved me probably 30-40 hours of work.
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This project teaches 2 concepts:
patience,
and If Statements and For Loops.
This project took an estimated 30-40 hours to make. And 3 seconds is all I have to show for all that work. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love and admire the entire thing about it, and I am proud of myself for accomplishing something, no doubt. I just kind of wish I had more than 3 seconds haha. But I guess this is how stop-motion animators might feel like.
I definitely learned a lot about being patient while working on this project. There were times when I decided that I have enough of Excel spreadsheets for my entire lifetime. But what kept me motivated during this project was the thought of how the project would look like at the end. I stayed motivated because I love this animation. And I really wanted to see it finished.
This project could have been adapted to teach a simple coding lesson about IF Statements and FOR Loops. For example, I could make a program that looks at whether a cell in a spreadsheet contains a hex code. If it doesn't, then the program stops, but if it does, the program converts the hex code into a color then moves to the next cell. This would require the use of an IF statement, and a flow diagram for this process using an IF statement would look like the following:
insert photo of flow diagram here
However, this project can also be used to teach FOR loops. For example, if I want the program to run x number of times, then I can set up a counter that starts at 1. This counter will add 1 to itself until it reaches the value x, which would tell the program to stop operating. This would require the use of a FOR statement, and a flow diagram for this process using a FOR statement would look like the following:
insert photo of flow diagram here
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