Bears Beat Battlestar Galactica
Stop motion animation

Role
Writing and adapting the scene, sculpting all characters and the set in Play-Doh, shooting each frame, compiling the sequence, and editing for pacing, done entirely solo.

The concept
Built for an "alternative animation project" class assignment, open-ended enough that the medium was my own choice, I chose stop motion. The scene recreated is a well-known moment from The Office, "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.", played with no audio, so the recognition has to come through motion and expression alone rather than the actual dialogue.

Process
Characters and the set were built and sculpted entirely in Play-Doh, then shot frame by frame, roughly 130 individual photos to capture the scene's movement. Those stills were compiled into a moving sequence in Blender, then edited and trimmed to smooth the pacing so the motion reads as one coherent scene rather than a series of individual shots.

What I learned
This was my first attempt at stop motion, so the entire process was new, from sculpting characters built to hold a pose frame after frame, to the discipline of shooting in small enough increments that the final motion reads smoothly, to compiling and pacing it all together afterward. It's a much slower, more deliberate way of animating than anything I'd done before.