Knitting the Horse in Motion v2

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A day of serious film production. After a two days of experimenting with digital video compression and low – res animation, I finally settled on an 25 fps, 11 second animation at 28 pixels wide. The final film is a basic sequence of the Horse in Motion, before it bursts into fireworks. This template created a piece of knitting that was 4878 rows long (around 12 metres) and equated to 272 ‘frames’ of knitted animation. The images were exported from Quicktime to an image sequance, and then compiled into a series of ‘film strips’ using the ‘combine’ filter in GIMP (why has everyone abandoned the Adobe Film Strip format?). This was then sent to the 950i in a series of tracks using Daviworks’ IMG2Track.

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Knitting the reel took nearly 3 hours, and it look as long again to pin it and steam it (note to self – maybe use cottons or acrylics next time – something less likely to constantly  curl up.) Finally then I was ready to animate, and after a false start, I settled on a mechanism that incorporated me carefully drawing the film over a bath-washing-rack and a black tshirt. The frames were captured using iStopmotion and then exported and edited in Final Cut Pro.

I’ll post the film here soon.