Star Wander

Well as you probably guessed i’m a bit of a nut when it comes to papercraft things, just found this  little stop motion animation via paperforest (full of really quirky paper enchantments that you can ogle for  hours on end.) This quirky little animation you see here were created by Eric Power a animator and film maker you can check out his blog via his quirky url: www.ericpowerup.net (made me giggle) or for his more professional site visit Clear Productions. He is a self taught animator and film-maker from Austin in Texas, his philopsy is:

everything can be learned simply through hard work and passion.  I also believe one of the best ways to learn how to make a film is to just go out and do it.

Power interests like many of the male gender lies in video games, therefore he combined his skill and love for animation and virtual entertainment to produce quirky paper treatments of gamer nerds golden oldies. Other recreations he created were Zelda and Mortal Kombat, these were just plain imitations of the game play with a paper treatment. However i think the Star Wars emulation was the best as it had alot more detail, i’m not really a Star Wars fan or anything and i haven’t watched the triology or anything (yes i know i should, it’s on my list to do one of these days just haven’t got around to it) but i did enjoy watching this motion piece but that might be also down to the score of the piece, quite liked it,  was very relaxing.  Well if your interested the soundtrack was by Jeremy Messersmith and entitled Tatooine. If you liked it you should check out Messersmith’s latest track Organ Donor (animation was also created by Power) and his album “The Reluctant Graveyard”.

I really liked Power’s quirky use of paper and his attention to detail with the use of layers and hand crafted die cuts to create shadows and form, he could’ve just had one colour in the background of the sunset but he chose to have four wavy layers instead which creates a fuller and vibrant image. Each individual element of characters, spaceships looked like it take alot of time to create, for example look at the Death Star and how many squares needed slicing and then cutting more from another colour and attaching it, very time consuming indeed. The only negative thing i can think of (for the geeks) is that princess Leia is definitely not hot and kinda looks like a guy lol (i remember Ross from Friends little fantasy) Tehehe However Luke Skywalker makes up for it with his very stylish and full hair. All in all it was a amazing intricate piece of work that lasted 2 min and 40 secs which mean there were alot of frames and took alot of time to animate aswell in other words its was alot of work but i think it was well worth it and the outcome turned out really well.