Project Anima is a fun process that blends traditional collage with digital technology. In this blog post I’ll give a brief overview of how the process works.

It starts just like any other collage with cutting out paper magazines. We’ve had good fortune finding obscure, often older magazines with some amazing content. A camera is pointed at two panes of glass that are separated by chunks of foam. This gives us three physical layers to manipulate our cut pieces. Molly sometimes uses cutout drawings she has made herself.

I coded a fairly simple program to capture images from a recording device. Every two seconds an image is saved to the computer. Then there are two playback buffers that read the images in the sequence they were captured. Using a midi controller I can adjust the playback speed and blending options of the two playback buffers.

Initially we used a DSLR camera to capture the images, but the camera would automatically turn off after a few minutes. It also had this annoying face detection that you apparently can’t disable on the Pentax KS-2. Here’s what the first Anima experiment looked like.

This is what the very first setup looked like:

After some trial and error we found that a secondary mechanical arm holding a smaller screen helped with framing and orientation of the camera. With the addition of the tiered glass panes, and a functional camera, we were in business!

Using this setup we’ve also tried our hand at traditional stop motion. It really does take forever – even a simple animation like this one:

The title of this animation is called “The rent is too damn high!”.

That’s about it. I thought since it’s such a unique project, it deserved some kind of background explanation. If you’d like to hear us talk even more about the project, check out this interview on Soundcloud.

Also check us out on Instagram.

Go back to the Project page.