Picnic edit

This is a little piece of family history. I'm helping J to edit a sequence of photos which were her first experience of stop motion animation. I don't know how many years ago P happened on some miniature bananas, which he bought for J and her toy monkey. Duster was (is!) her replica of the curious little spider monkeys which wanted to climb all over her and her wheelchair when we visited Apenheul, a Dutch monkey park, during a spring holiday in the Netherlands. On bringing the bananas home, he decided the monkey should be filmed eating them, so we set up a picnic under the plum tree, with several other toy animals joining in, and featuring the tea set which was one of her favourite toys. J's job, of course, was to eat the banana and the chocolate chip cookies between frames. P shot the animation in single frames, and later downloaded the photos to his computer, where we saw the very fast moving sequence running in a programme appropriately called Monkey Jam. J has been remembering her early experiences of animation while preparing for her recent interviews, and asked him if he still had the photos. She has downloaded them onto a timeline in her stop motion software and set them to play in fours, so that each frame is seen for about 1/6th second rather than 1/25th. Now we are going through it a frame at a time, inserting further pauses where we think they are needed. This will make the animation more jerky, but given that we don't have software or skills to create in-between shots digitally, I don't think there's anything else we can do.  It's not going to be a great work of art, but it's a good memory.