When I bought this desk lamp years ago it reminded me of the lamps from Pixar's Luxo Jr. short film. Once I read the description for this assignment I knew I wanted to do something with the lamp; it has a lot of limitations but the various joints allow it to be fairly expressive. After I settled on an idea, I recruited Angelo for help in being a second character in the stop motion animation. I love the short film Luminaris which uses people as the stop motion characters and wanted to give it a try.
I set up a portable easel as a tripod for my ipad mini which I used to take the pictures. I animated straight ahead and repositioned the lamp and/or Angelo for every shot; positioning the lamp with my hands and positioning Angelo with my hands or verbal directions. I had to restart a few times as I figured things out. There are over 300 unique frames in the animation. I used Adobe Flash to time out the frames and export them as a movie file.
