Animation (ANI2) - Light Painting

Light painting is a technique often used in photography to track light as it moves. In order to do this you need to use a slow shutter speed on your camera and bright lights. You can use any colours and move the light in any way you want. Some people draw specific things and some just like to wave the light around so that it creates a nice pattern. The photos often come out something like this:

(These are all photos that my friends and I took together)

We combined this technique with stop motion to create short animations of moving light. This was a fairly lengthy and confusing process, but the end results were worth it. In order to do this, you simply draw something with your light (in a dark room of course) and take picture. You then need to remember where and how you drew the last picture and draw it again, moving it slightly this time - as you would with stop-motion animation. After repeating this for some time, you can put all the images you have captured together and it will hopefully form a moving light painting.

Here's an example of light painting used in animation from an artist called Darren Pearson:

We spent a whole day in a dark room trying to animate different things, it's safe to say it hurt our eyes when we ventured back out into the daylight. Animating through light painting can be difficult when you can't really tell what your drawing looks like until the photo has been taken. Also it takes practice to time the painting with the shutter speed, but once you get the hang of it, you get into a rhythm.

Here's a few short animations we came up with during the day:

This was probably the technique I enjoyed the most and I think we all had fun waving lights around and seeing what we could produce. It's also great because as long as you have a camera with an adjustable and a fairly dark room (or outside in the evening works really well,) you can create these wherever you like. I will definitely be trying this technique again in the future.