YMPÄRI YMPÄRI YMPÄRI

Animated moving bricks of Vuhvelituotanto are back, even if they were never gone! Vuhveli will be!

This stop-motion spectacle was on production from August 2020 to April 2021. I had built Jean of Emergent Dance last summer for New Elementary's article. As I photographed the model, I noticed that it was very well balanced and sturdy. As I had plenty of free time - my last year at the Unversity had just started remote - I began making some animation tests myself. Stop-motion is easiest with two people, as pair of extra hands saves lot of running around. All the previous Vuhveli animations had been done that way. However, this had become harder since 2016 when I and the other Vuhveli fellow Esko moved to study in separate cities, Tampere and Helsinki. The pandemic didn't help, neither.

I found out that the easiest way was to adjust the camera shooting timelapse shot per 10 seconds, moving the figure and afterwards deleting all the shots where my arms are visible. I shot outside in the garden, as I always do, which meant quite stark contrasts with late-summer sun! I personally enjoyed this effect. It removed the style away from usual studio-level stop motion, creating something original! Of course there was all sort of embuggerances - figure falling down and them haphazardly recovered, camera somehow moving off-focus, over-exposure and under-exposure... But in the end, I think these "problems" enhance the atmosphere, where Esko's eerie sound art and computer effects add their own piquant charm.

-Eero