Stop and Go Motion

Back in elementary school, I used to go to a nerd camp after school called Smarty Pants. Essentially, it was just a bunch of 20 year-olds and young adults who were tech-savvy and wanted to teach kids. Every Wednesday and Friday, I believe, we would walk over from the elementary school to Smarty Pants and work on different projects, such as Photoshop, photography, LEGO robotics, or video game design. One week I worked on a few stop animation projects with my mentor John. I remember one project using Play-Doh, we made a cartoon-ish piece of poop (pictured below) and the story line was that we would find the poop, pick it up, place it in the microwave, and it would come out burnt. I know, it was a childish stop-animation project, but I was like 10 years old. The time it took us to make this 30 second masterpiece must've been at least 2 weeks (including editing). With this in mind, I watch these videos such as Kina's jelly beans (I love her stuff), or the weird Mexican N.A.S.A. video, and I realize that my project was fractions of a percent of the work and effort these artists put in. The White Stripes' video of LEGOs was also one of my favorites, I remember seeing the video on MTV a while back. Lastly, the video "Bottle," which I remember being big on this website Wimp.com  was a great insight at another stop animation project that must've been killer to work on. Much respect to these artists, I wish I had the patience and drive to do what you do.