Photographer and animator Brett Foxwell teamed up with friend and musician Conor Grebel to create something awesome. Together, they painstakingly milled their way through several pieces of wood, layer by layer, capturing one frame of video at a time to create a stop motion film they’re calling WoodSwimmer.
As you can imagine, the process of actually capturing this film was incredibly time-consuming, and at times grueling.
‘[The final video] involved endless hours of shooting, cutting, and prepping for each frame,’ Brett tells DPReview. ‘Which involved either clearing all the wood chips away or keeping them looking consistent and pretty, and finally applying wood oil to the sample for each frame.’
You can see the mess this process created in some behind the scenes images Brett shared with us. Unfortunately, he only captured a couple of these BTS shots, because, in his words, ‘It was just such a grueling process that I never got around to getting proper documentation of the process.’
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Regarding gear, Brett tells us he used a Canon EOS 60D with Tamron 90mm macro lens attached. This setup was tethered to DragonFrame, a stop-motion capture software that Brett says is “a great tethering application even if you’re not shooting specifically stop-motion.”
Tons of work and a nightmare to clean up, but well worth it when you get a load of the final product. Here are a couple of stills Brett sent our way:
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Several stills from WoodSwimmer are available as prints from Brett’s website, and you can see more of his stop motion, nature photography, and other artistic work by following him on Instagram.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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