This video was my first attempt at doing stop motion animation by myself, using exclusively what I already had on hand. My prior stop motion work is limited to a short that my friend and I did for a class where he operated the camera and I did the work with the G.I Joes that we used (the man in the jeep with the smoke is a figure built from G.I. Joe pieces for that particular animation) so I decided to use G.I Joe figures yet again as actors for their articulation and my familiarity with them.
Using a Concord eyeQ 3042 AF camera 3.1 Megapixel with a 25W desk lamp for the lighting, the pictures produced were of less than great quality. Unfortunately, I found out later that taking the pictures from a distance of about one foot probably contributed to the problem because a distance of two feet or more is needed for the camera to focus properly. I also found that operating the camera as well as the figures proved far more difficult than I expected. It was surprisingly hard to constantly shift my hands between the two without disrupting either more than intended.
The voiceover was done using the program CamStudio. I felt like Nietzsche's story of the Madman had a dream like structure to it so I read the short story "The Madman" into it and then chopped it down using Windows Movie Maker. I wanted to really see the difference between programs such as Avid and FinalCut compared to programs like Windows Movie Maker and iMovie and the programs don't compare at all, movie maker is far more limited.