“The Sandpit” is time-lapse of over 35000 tilt shift photos taken at New York. This short film was created by artist Sam O’Hare. Sam used Nikon D3 with Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 and Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 lenses. Tilt shift effect was added at post production. Taking all the photos took 5 days and two evenings at August 2009. Best viewed in full-screen HD mode.
Beautiful music clip of Oren Lavie song “Her morning elegance”. It is made in once place but stop motion keeps it changing and song is quite good too.
Pigeon Pilfer is Michael Stevenson’s senior film from San Francisco State University. It was completed in four months with sixty pounds of clay, a digital SLR camera, and one tiny hot room. More information on Pigeon Pilfer.
2009 year was really good year for stop-motion animation in my view 
. I was hooked on this type of animation after I saw Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. This year it gave two great stories “Mary and Max” and “Coraline”. Here are my favorites containing mystery, fantasy, dark theme and quite funny with proper understanding.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
“Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” was released in 1993 by Tim Burton and Henry Selick. It tells the story of Jack, who lives in “Halloween Town” and one day opens a portal to “Christmas Town”, there all the fun begins as Jack tries to re-create Christmas at Halloween. It has very defining style of Tim Burton with slim figures, dark theme, sarcasm, other jokes and singing. It was nominated for Oscar, won 4 awards and 5 more nominations. Here is short clip:
Corpse Bride
This was my second encounter with Tim Burton’s production on stop-motion. It was released in 2005 by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson. “Corpse Bride” tells story of Victor and Victoria who should get married, but while Victor practices his vows in forest and gets them right for the first time, he finds him self married to Emily, the corpse bride. It features almost same style as “The Nightmare Before Christmas” but a bit lighter. It was nominated for Oscar, won 5 awards and 14 more nominations.
Coraline
It was released in 2009 by Henry Selick. “Coraline” tells a story about young girl, witch finds a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternative version of her reality, there things seems much better. But later she discovers that not everything looks as it appears. I really liked what one of the creators has told: “If it was movie it would be too scary to watch for children, but stop-motion animations allows to tell this story”.I also really likes sound track of this animation.
Mary and Max
This is the latest of stop-motion and probably best I saw. It already has won 3 awards and it was released 2009 by Adam Elliot. It’s a tale about pen-friendship between two very different people: Mary Dinkle, living in the suburbs of Australia and Max Horovitz, severely obese, atheistic Jewish man with Asperger syndrome who lives in New York City. Story mood is quite dark, but animations are full of sarcasm and jokes, witch for some people could be hard to understand and insult. Soundtrack is very light compared to images, but just great. It is also stated that it is based on true story. Recommend to anyone who likes good stories, but sometimes complicated.
