Those years at Aardman must have rubbed off!

Many years ago I was given something called a "Magic Tree".  The premise was that you stood the cardboard shape in a shallow tray and poured the sachet of clear liquid into the tray.  The liquid soaked up into the cardboard and then as it dried (over the space of several hours) it formed crystals and also absorbed colour from dye impregnated into the cardboard.  Very clever and interesting to a scientist but not magic.  ;-)

I'd not seen them for years until my Mother-in-law gave me one for Christmas.  I was going to send her a photo of it to say thank you but then I had a better idea.....how about a time lapse movie of it developing!

I was, at this time, working as the Financial Controller of Aardman Animations, the company behind animation classics such as Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run.  I obviously didn't get too involved in the creative side of the business but some of it must have rubbed off.

Christmas Tree
The model she gave me was a Christmas tree.  A fairly simple affair, bauble chain and star on the top.  My camera was a simple Casio digital compact.  I set it up on a table top tripod and had to manually expose each shot.  I started every 5 minutes but i t was developing quite fast so I increased it to every 3 minutes.  As it slowed down I changed this to every 4 minutes then back to 5.  In the end I took 217 frames.

I didnt' have any fancy video production software so I simply used Movie Maker.  The results were pretty good but were lacking something, a soundtrack.

I couldn't decide what sort of music to use so I created two.  I had to set the frame rate differently for each so that I could spread the shots across the whole piece of music.  I quickly realised that I didnt' have enough shots to make a smooth animation but my primary concern had been either the battery running out on the camera or running out of space on the SD card.  I could change neither without moving he camera and removing the tripod so it was a one shot deal.

Despite this I think the results weren't bad for a first attempt.

So impressed was the MIL that the next year she gave me something a little more ambitious, a mountain scene.  Again I had the same equipment and recording limitations but confidently set off at a frame every 6 minutes.  I soon reduced this to 5 minutes once the initial soak had passed.  As the trees developed , however, progress slowed again and I stretched it out to every 10 minutes.  I continued this until 10.30 pm. (I had started at 9.30am!)  I felt I had to go to bed so I left it overnight and took a final picture in the morning when everything had dried out.

There was such a difference between the penultimate and last shots that I had to find a way of making a feature out of it rather than trying to smooth it over.  I hope you like what I did.  ;-)  This animation is made up of 121 frames.

All was quiet for a couple of years and then I received another mountain scene.  I had by now upgraded to a Nikon D5000 and had a mains power supply.  This had the added benefit of having a facility to leave it running and it would automatically take a picture at a preset interval.  This was going to be a lot less labour intensive than previous projects where I had to sit and take a picture every few minutes myself.

I also tried to learn from my mistakes and turned the heating up so that it wouldn't take overnight for it to develop fully.

I set the timer to take a frame every 1 minute.  I had a massive memory card in and mains power so wasn't concerned about running out of either.  In the end I had 2055 frames and a different take on the musical accompaniment.  Enjoy!