54? Hour Video Race

If I could sum it up in a few words: Very cool idea for a project, but it definitely did not produce my best work. I went into this project kind of blind because I had no idea what I wanted to do and had done no planning before receiving the mystery prop at noon on the dot. Then when I found out we had to make a film (without a movie camera) with the cookie cutters, I just kinda felt like "Oh...shit." But, rather than panicking, I followed my trend of making a holiday-themed short and chose to apply my stop-animation filmmaking knowledge to this project. I ended up using my roommate's digital camera (because it was a whole lot better than mine) and finished after shooting around 215 pictures total. After stringing all the pictures together in final cut, shortening them to last 2 frames (instead of 10 seconds, the default; this was a huge P.I.T.A.), doing some very basic effects, deleting bad frames and slapping some holiday music underneath, I called it quits. I felt like I could have produced a much better final result, had I taken more pictures (maybe twice as many) and played with lighting a lot more. I felt pretty unaccomplished and believed this project to be absolutely terrible until the audience reacted in a much more positive manner than I had expected. It was a fun little project, but I wish I could have gone back and done it again with much more focus. Then again...we only had 48 (54) hours.