Assignment 1 (a.k.a. friggin' awesome dancing car)

This is why I make stop-motion animations.  Not that what I have done is in any way comparable to this video, but one might say I aspire to greatness such as this.  The creator of this video, Patrick Boivin, is obviously a professional, and he has directed commercials in stop motion and other forms of animation (I'm not sure about live action).  When I first saw his transformers stop motion videos, I was in awe of the smooth, complex ways in which he made these toys move.  I can hardly get a lego person with 7 points of articulation to walk right, while this guy can get a transformer with like, 30 ball joints to breakdance so effortlessly, it looks like motion capture cgi.  Patrick Boivin certainly does have much more experience and better resources than I do, but still I doubt that I will ever be his equal.  I would say that Patrick Boivin is my filmmaking role model.  He does a little bit of everything, makes money by making commercials, and makes mind-blowing animations just for fun.

interpreting how Mr. Boivin made this is kind of cheating for me, since I have seen how he has made some of his other videos, but I will "analyze" it anyway.  First off, he probably made this film primarily with Dragon Stop-motion, since that is what he used for his other videos, and it is a widely used professional grade stop-motion filming application.  It is also likely that he filmed the figure in front of a green screen and filmed the background separately, since animating takes a lot of time and if he took the frames "on location," the natural lighting might have changed.  I would not doubt that he used photoshop to minimize the "cracks" on the transformer toy in the beginning frames to make it more realistic.  On another note, the toy it the video is almost entirely custom.  From experience, I know that Transformers toys are not nearly as limber or poseable as this toy.  In shots from the video, one well trained in the lego arts can identify that Mr. Boivin has replaced many of BumbleBee's joints with Lego Bionicle pieces, allowing the toy to bend its legs and waste more realistically, and to give it better proportions.

Thanks To Monsieur Boivin's mad animation and toy modification skillz, this little yellow car can throw down with our very own Sean Whang in a b-boy dance off.  Patrick Boivin's totally amazing and kick-butt videos can be found on his youtube channel right--here.