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Fun with Hair
November 19, 2009 7:52 pm
Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of hair and pixilation. The film is by Andy Estep. (Thanks, Marc Deckter) 23 comments posted in Stop Motion 
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This is brilliant! I don’t understand quite what he’s doing, but he does it well.
This needs to be sped up times four.
I loved it and am very jealous since I don’t have enough hair anymore to try something like this. I wonder if Andy plans any follicular merchandising . . .
Music would have REALLY helped this. But other wise, it’s really ingenious! Haha, Bravo.
It looks like a fever dream. I had to watch it all.
Some Zagreb/Bozetto-style sound effects would have made it even better. Maybe with a soundtrack score played on a maddening, obscure stringed instrument – or a late-70s monophonic synth, slightly detuned.
I’m impressed although I am having a hard time figuring out how the hell it was done!
DAMN that’s a LOT of patience!!
I loved this! It’s very creative and fun. The only comment I have is the addition of a soundtrack would’ve been nice, but this is a very well made film that made for an entertaining watch. Kudos!
I’m baffled at how he did this. Did he seriously regrow his ‘fro and beard multiple times just so he could shave it off and ‘animate’ different ways of removing it? Holy crap.
@Gobo:
Exactly what I was wondering. I can think of no other way to do this.
If he keeps on doing this we can watch him gradually turn gray.
Some people have WAY too much time on their hands.
Keeping the deadpan expression throughout it all really did it for me. And he did manage to blink on occasion, something people don’t consider when they’re doing stop-motion/pixilation. I’m pretty sure a soundtrack will be added in the future, just think: he probably took over a year to let his hair to regrow several times and put this together. The filmmakers were probably anxious to show off what they’ve done.
Apparently he grew his hair all the way out several times, and took stills as he clipped it away. Then reversed the footage, then waited a few months. Note that he does look about a year older by the end of the clip.
Dear Mr. Estep:
Please write in and tell us how the hell this was done.
Yours truly,
a fan
This is a bit like a film we did back in 2003 called The Beardmaker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I0DRDkVJLc
No, don’t tell us! The mystery is much more intriguing!
One guess:
– Shoot himself doing each of the moves without cutting the hair. Call it the reference film.
– Take the individual frames of the reference film and rearrange them into a “shooting script”: That is, all the different poses and angles with the first chunk of hair cut off, then all the different poses and angles with the next chunk of hair cut off, etc.
– Take all those stills and reorder them to match the original reference film.
Thus he can get all the variations from one head of hair. Faster, but still an incredible amount of work going through all the setups and angles after each bit of clipping. Perhaps he let the hair grow back once to divide the shooting in half — still faster than waiting for it to grow back for each angle.
This type of person is everything thats wrong with animation…
He’s like the Ethan Hunt of animation!
“Some people have WAY too much time on their hands.”
Really? You’re going to say THIS?
Funny, full of craft and appreciation for the visual potential of pixilation. Ideal texture and color of hair for the project. Only wish it had gone to more extremes — totally hairless, eyebrows as big as the moustache, all-out fur-face, things like that.
I did a similar video playing with different hair lengths (-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIRw2T9z_Mw – shrinking and growing, exactly as Donald Benson was talking about.
Andy’s short takes it in an entirely different direction, playing out as more of a proof of concept than an animated short. Still, I do love it.