All video is essentially stop-motion animation. You take a series of still pictures and play them back in order. The faster you play them, the more lifelike they become, until at some point they become “moving pictures”. Play one picture every 5 seconds, you have a slide show. Play one picture every 1/2 second, it’s hard to concentrate on any of them. Play one picture every 1/10 of a second (or 10 images (aka “frames”) per second) and you get really jerky “video”. Play 22 or 23 frames per second, it’s approaching fast enough to look like video.

Get to 24 fps, and all of a sudden, you’re watching a movie. Very cool.

Go to 30 fps and you’ve got TV. (Ok geek nitpickers, I know that regular TV is 60 fields interlaced, not true progressive 30 fps. And that it’s really 59.94 and 29.97 for NTSC video. But now you’re just ruining the fun of the journey with technical details.)

So with all that in mind, I give you another YouTube video. This one is a fan-generated video for the band Modest Mouse. Someone took the provided footage, printed each frame out on paper, then took digital pictures of each frame and re-assembled them digitally, playing them back fast enough to re-create the original video. The rest of the footage looks like very fast stop-motion animation (which it is).

It’s an amazing video, with an amazing amount of work behind it. I’m still amazed it didn’t win the contest. It’s one of the coolest videos I’ve ever seen.

Here ’tis…

Hope you enjoyed it as much as I continue to! 

An amazing stop-motion human tetris video. Youtube is always full of surprises.

Happy Eve of the New Year!