Pom Bear Obics - Stopmotion Snack Food Video

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Pom-Bears are puffy little crispy potato snacks, shaped like teddy bears, but can they dance?

 

The Making Of

I happened to notice that they are all slightly different - both by accident and by design - that is, they are made in four distinct poses (both paws down, both paws up and each of left and right paws up) - and the process of manufacture introduces variation in the form of size, curl and planar distortion.

pombear2.JPGExtracting order out of this chaos was just a case of opening a few packets and sifting through them to get a variety of different poses and attitudes, photographing them on a makeshift rostrum camera setup, then arranging them into an order that suggests continuous movement.

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I had to open four packets of Pom-bears to get about 100 intact specimens for photographing, although only about half of those pictures ended up being used in the film.

Origin Of Idea

The concept for this video came from the accidental collision of two ideas - firstly, a conversation with my kids about animation in a general sense - about how it is built up by showing a rapid sequence of images or objects which all differ in some small way, creating the illusion of movement.

Without that conversation as a primer, the simple observation that Pom-Bear snacks were all a little different from each other might have generated no more than a shrug, but the two ideas clicked into place almost audibly, and the concept for Pom-Bearobics was born.

I created the background music using Dance Ejay 4. It doesn't have a name.

Note

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