ten thousand takes

© SARAH, TENTHOUSANDTAKES, MCDM, Cohort 12

I was struck by how beautiful and imaginative it was, not to mention cleverly designed. I wondered how many hours went into carefully planning each shot, and then meticulously carrying out that plan, all for fewer than 120 seconds of stop-motion animation. What fun it must have been! How satisfying to see it come together!

The other day, as I searched our bookshelves for Friends: The Official Trivia Guide (to presently be offered for sale with my complete ten-season collection of Friends episodes on DVD, watched once, $50 OBO), I complained to Guy that our bookshelves were a mess and their contents in dire need of reorganization. He suggested it wait until we move in the next couple of months, positing that it would be easier to organize them as we unloaded boxes on the other end. I disagreed, asserting that it would be easier to box up our books in an organized way so they would be easier to sort when we do move. Instead, I did laundry.

Two days later, I stayed home with a cold (always boring) and decided to entertain myself by moving forward with the reorganization. Inspired by the bookstore video, I decided to make it into a photo project. I mounted my camera onto a tripod and vowed to take a picture every few minutes as my work progressed. The before/after shots together make me wonder what I really accomplished:

© SARAH, TENTHOUSANDTAKES

But, when I put these two shots together into an endless loop with the intermediate 30 shots that made the cut (some weren’t different enough to make the loop interesting) using Photoshop, the changes I made are quite clear, and somewhat mesmerizing:

© SARAH, TENTHOUSANDTAKES

Certainly, it doesn’t come close to the video, but it was fun to do all the same! If I could do this again, I would increase the frequency of my shots – ideally, I would take a picture each time I removed a book from the shelf, but given that this project took me three hours, I can only imagine how long a book-by-book project would take! Maybe it would be easier with a few extra hands…