BY MADI DETTLINGER ’13| Staff Writer

Creating an impressive video for an Honors Freshman English project, Natalie Schunk ’15 has found her passion in video animation.

The video, a paper stop motion, was created for a project about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It chronicles Dr. Frankenstein’s efforts in creating his monster, showing scenes of him collecting body parts, assembling the monster and bringing it to life.

Schunk’s efforts with the film did not go unnoticed. Youtube comments on the video sing her praises with exclamations like, “Brilliant!” and “Amazing work!” One viewer, presumably a teacher, went as far as saying that Mary Shelley would be proud and that he planned on using the video as inspiration for his students.

Her first hour class voted her project the best of the hour, and teachers at the school have used it as inspiration for students to show what they can create if they put their mind to it, said Kelli Fimbinger, Schunk’s English teacher.

Grant Lobert ’14, Schunk’s friend, agreed that the video was one of Schunk’s finest.

“I thought it was amazing,” said Lobert.

Schunk said it took a lot of time and hard work to get to the skill level needed to create the stop-motion film, starting with cartooning classes.

“I had always thought it would be kind of cool to make my own cartoon, but I never really thought it through. Then I took a cartooning class three years ago where part of the program was to make an animation in Adobe Flash, and I found out that I really liked it a lot and wanted to do more animating,” said Schunk.

 Schunk got more and more interested in animating, eventually producing her own films. Besides Frankenstein, she has done four different videos using varied animation techniques.

 “The first was the one I made in the (animation) class three years ago. It’s still on my Youtube. It’s two seconds long. The second was a stop-motion with little bead animals I found, and I made them go on an adventure for a treasure chest. It wasn’t very smooth animation. The third one was my first experience with paper animation, which was great. I liked that a lot. The fourth one was about 20 seconds, and it was a ‘dapper’ gentleman getting quite upset about his moustache flying off his face,” said Schunk.

Schunk said that the amount of time and work put in for a video depends on what you are working with and the type of video that is being created.

“For something like Frankenstein I had to make sure the tripod and background scenes didn’t move at all, and everything had to be absolutely perfect, essentially,” said Schunk. “The whole thing took well over 24 hours and editing took up less than 5 hours, I believe. The paper puppets and backgrounds alone took up around 10 hours. I think I made a few mistakes overall, but it’s my second paper animation I’ve ever made so I’m definitely not a professional.”

There are many qualities that one has to have in order to be a successful animator, Schunk said. Besides a good camera and an artistic eye, animators have to be willing to work and to persevere. They have to will themselves to keep going despite different setbacks that may be encountered.

“If you want to animate, then you have to be patient,” Schunk said. “Expensive software and tools always help, but being creative and devoted is the most important thing.”