STOP THE MOTION, I WANT TO GET OFF

Bugs Bunny's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve never created animation (does a wheel with three pictures on it and a pin in the middle count?) and I’ve generally thought that, as an adult, I no longer had any interest in cartoons.  All that changed last week, when I went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria.  Most of the exhibits there involved animation, covering both the technical and creative sides of the field.  Chuck Jones, creator of many classic cartoons like Road Runner and Bugs Bunny was featured prominently. What I realized when I went through the exhibit is that the classic cartoons, whether the Road Runner, Bugs Bunny or Bullwinkle, are not just for little children, but for big ones, who (allegedly) are much more discerning and  better behaved.  Several of the cartoons were showing, and as I watched, I realized how smart they really are.

I even had a chance to become an animator – well, a stop motion animation maker – kind of.  There was a section at the museum that supplied some backgrounds and movable pieces that one could place on a computer screen and take 12 consecutive shots.  The computer would digitally edit them together,and voila! You had your own home (or museum-) made stop-motion film!  The films were a lot of fun to make (I made two), but had an interesting feature.  After clicking the “record” button, if you didn't move your hand away fast enough, the shot would show your hand moving the pieces. I had to do one of my films over twice before I had the timing down well enough so that my hand didn’t show in any of the shots.

The museum had another fun interactive feature.  It would record a sort of video of a person moving and then make a flip book out of it that the person could purchase.  For those of you who don’t know what  flip book is, it’ a book with a series of pictures that, when you flip them, give the optical illusion that the figure in the pictures is moving.  I had a video of me throwing a kiss at the camera.  Well, that’s what it was supposed to look like.  Instead, it kind of looked like I had just coughed or sneezed and was throwing my germs out to the camera. What can I say.  I don’t have a lot of experience being Miss America or a winner on American idol. I was going to purchase my flip book anyway, but forgot to.  Then again, had the salesperson seen it, museum personnel might have tried to quarantine me.

Just to show you that I wasn't making up my two brilliant stop motion films, here they are (don't blink or you might miss them):

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