The child experiments with filming his imagination

The child experiments with filming his imagination
Digital photo with post production
Copyright J Kearns 2006
View On White

H.o.p. enjoys filming little movies and taking hundreds of photos learning stop animation.

He is quite the little artist, always drawing and making clay sculptures, but when doing his stop animation he is satisfied with cruder elements. What he sees through the camera lens is tinged with what he sees internally. It’s obvious that the world around him disappears and what remains before him is a fantastic scene he has created in his mind. He spent several days in June laboring over a film involving ice and water, cutting up and crumpling bits of white paper and setting them carefully upon a dark blue fleece blanket. It was obvious what he was going for and what he was seeing, but of course in all the hundreds of shots he took the flash of the camera highlighted the fleece of the blanket. Still, he labored on, hopeful, and determined to film the scene. When he was done he decided not to put it together into a movie but was not very disappointed despite all the work. “It’s all part of learning,” he said.

Here, H.o.p. is taking stills for a stop animation of a vampire fighting robot disguised as an alien bird.

H.o.p.’s favorite color is blue. I did several versions of this–a gold, a color, a black and white and a blue. I asked H.o.p.’s opinion and he voted for the blue.