This is

I’ve always been a big fan of stop-motion animation, from Ray Harryhausen to Nick Park, but it never occurred to me that it was something I could do myself.

I was inspired to start when a work colleague brought a cheap l’Espion digital camera into the office. In the course of playing about with it, he made a very short and slightly ropy film of a toy Mike Wazowski (from Monsters Inc) eating a Post-It note.

I was amazed that it could be so simple to produce a film, and I went straight out and had a good old google for more information. The next thing I knew, I had a camera, some free software and my old childhood LEGO collection and I was away.

The films below were all done under poor lighting conditions with a l’Espion camera, so bear with me. They’re mostly tests that I did to get the hang of animation and/or effects. They’re all encoded with DivX 5.0.2 (you can download the latest DivX codec from www.divx.com). Apologies to Mac users and anyone else with an irrational dislike of DivX - I don’t intend to convert these to any other format because life really is too short.

I don’t think any of these are over 10 seconds long. Enjoy.

• My very first animation - Riverdance
• My first walk cycle
• My first run cycle
• A Mexican wave - works best if you loop it
• Busting the phat beats
• An attempt at animating 4 characters at once
• Fun with chairs
• My first fx shot
• The obligatory light sabre fight
• My first drunken stagger cycle
• Zombie rising from the grave
• A ghostly skeleton menaces an unsuspecting victim