The Original Lunamation
It was a concept by myself and Tavis Weir back in January, 2008. We shot a video of his roommate's cat Luna, printed out the frames, then invited some friends over. Everyone had their own idea of what to trace, so we tried to stay out of their way.
The next day I scanned in the frames, and discovered the random, chaotic energy created by the group that brought the animation to life. Details missed by one person were picked up by somebody else. It had the look of everyone talking at the same time- but about the same thing.
Evolved Process
When I returned to Lunamation two years later, I knew I wanted to create the same environment as before, but on a bigger scale.
Part of the solution were the Lunamation boards, based on the advice of a fellow animator, Brian McPhail. I designed them to work with an ordinary 3-hole-punch to keep the thousands of paper frames aligned as people traced them. The same boards were used to align the pages for capturing with an SLR (using Dragon Stop Motion software) during the sessions. Check out Akasha to see the newest attempt at Lunamtion.
The Release Party
After all the work had been done, I felt that each frame deserved its own time in the sun. We had two release parties: one at Supermarket and a private one at the HerciniArts studio. During the Few's set, we projected the video behind the band, but slowed the 4 minute video down to 50 minutes (around a second per frame).
The result was funny at times- drawings that no one intended to be shown for more than a twelfth of a second- but sharing everyone's hard work was a good way to cap off such a community based project.
