Published: 10/20/2020

Making stop motion videos is easy today. Every computer comes with video editing software, and phone apps make the process simple. Back in the 90’s, that wasn’t the case, but I was fortunate that my family had an RCA VHS camcorder.

It had a stop motion mode. For every press of a button, it recorded about 1/4 second of video, but there was a delay. If you were careful, you could record your video, but there were no undoes and redoes. Nearly every project, we got the timing wrong and got our hands in the shot. After recording the video, you could come back and dub in new audio. If you didn’t dub new audio, you got 1/4 second of the original audio for each frame.

These videos have a little bit of modern day cleanup (removing the audio, fixing a few bad frames, etc.), but my friends and I had a great time making them!

Remember Mr. Bill? Here’s our clearly derivative work: Willy the Worm.

Because taking a single frame took a long time (relatively), there was always the tendency to have lots of things going on at once. Transformers were always good choices for subjects.

This video was a little beyond our technical abilities at the time. We were able to get the dance moves in time, but not synced up with the tempo of the songs. Once I got into digital video editing, syncing up was easier.

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