| Ellie's Stop Motion Animation |
Ellie loves her iphone. She uses it to take pictures
until the batteries run out, then she comes upstairs, plugs it in to
recharge, and takes one of ours, until the battery runs out, at which
point she comes back up to switch it out with her re-charged phone.
She
has taken thousands of photographs. Thousands and thousands. She had
the curious habit of taking many, many pictures of the same thing. We
would delete them and let her start over again, and she never seemed to
mind that the old photos were gone.
A few days ago I needed some
random photo off my phone, and I synched it with my computer before I
had the chance to delete all her photos. I was annoyed with myself, as
it took about twenty-five minutes for the phone to sync with all her
photos on there. At one point I started to flip through the photos
using the arrow keys, which allows you to flip pretty quickly through
the large format pictures if you like. It was at that point I realized
what a dummy I am.
She wasn't taking fifty pictures of the same thing.
She
was making a movie, probably seeing the movie in her head as she moved
her toys a fraction of an inch before taking each photo. She couldn't
see the final result on film, but it must be able to animate all these
photos and string them together in her head to see the movie. I
thought about Temple Grandin's book "Thinking in Pictures". According
to her, autistic people don't think in words, but in pictures, and can
manipulate these pictures in their head like a computer. I think that
is what Ellie had been doing with her photographs.
So without
further ado I present you with "Mickey's Ride" and "A Space Flight". I uploaded her little films to YouTube, and have embedded them here.
Enjoy!
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