Nibbling Destruction in Stop Motion

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By Becky Stern
Posted 2011/04/26 @ 10:00 am
Category Photography & Video

Ryan Kothe’s animated short, “Worn Out,” shows objects seemingly disintegrating before your eyes. I thought I spied some telltale Dremel marks in some of the shots, but I can’t be sure. How do you think this short was made? Post your theories in the comments. [via Core77]

BY Becky Stern

Becky Stern is head of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries. Her personal site: sternlab.org

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23 Responses to Nibbling Destruction in Stop Motion

Ben Brockert on April 26th, 2011 at 5:19 pm said:

With the parallel grooves and big shavings I’d guess a bastard file.

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Alexander on April 26th, 2011 at 5:33 pm said:

My bet is on a rasp-style file. The marks in parallel at the end gave it away for me.

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George Hadley on April 26th, 2011 at 5:43 pm said:

An important note in the video, it lists the materials for the pencil as lead, wood, and paint coating. You’d need to hunt down a pretty old pencil to get an actual lead pencil (I think)

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- Kaithar on April 26th, 2011 at 10:53 pm said:
  
  Pencils have never contained actual lead, just a material that looked a bit like lead.
  
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  Caleb Jamison on May 1st, 2011 at 1:55 am said:
  
  Similarly, it labeled a lid as being made of tin, it was almost certainly al.
  
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John Edgar Park on April 26th, 2011 at 6:02 pm said:

Pretty sure he uses mind bullets.

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- David Moore on April 26th, 2011 at 6:35 pm said:
  
  That’s telekinesis, John.
  
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Gordon McLellan on April 26th, 2011 at 6:13 pm said:

fantastic macro photography, I really enjoy the super narrow depth of field. I suspect some sort of manual hand tool over a power tool, due to the fact the disintegrated bits aren’t disturbed very much. a rotary cutting / grinding tool would be blasting them all over the place

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Dennis Cluett on April 26th, 2011 at 6:36 pm said:

Checkering file or a Rasp I would say.

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David Rennalls on April 26th, 2011 at 7:24 pm said:

Rotary file or rasp?

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Anonymous on April 26th, 2011 at 8:53 pm said:

Manual rasp or vixie file is my vote. Dremel isn’t possible due to excessive flingage that we don’t see here.

And a great deal of patience. All my time lapse movies are just fast motion timed sequence shots of normal speed folks doing stuff. Props dude.

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Machinebot on April 26th, 2011 at 9:03 pm said:

One word- Gremlins….

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Dean Segovis on April 26th, 2011 at 10:26 pm said:

I found this short video very mesmerizing! I wish it was longer… inspiring and nicely done!

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Triacron on April 27th, 2011 at 6:28 am said:

probably sandblasting… ???

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Anonymous on April 27th, 2011 at 12:04 pm said:

Try running it backwards

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migpics on April 27th, 2011 at 12:51 pm said:

Actually this was filmed by simply placing different materials on the stage, letting them come together through the use of magic, and then playing it backwards to make it look like things were falling apart.

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Anonymous on April 27th, 2011 at 3:44 pm said:

Cheese grater!

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Anonymous on April 27th, 2011 at 8:12 pm said:

The rasp sounds right, but all mine have the teeth offset to prevent the parallel trenches that show up in this fine short film. And the trenches appear deeper than the ~1mm teeth of a coarse rasp. It really looks like a dinner fork, or a car key, but it could just be the first row of a rasp. The swarf looks right for one.

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Wayne Dancer on April 27th, 2011 at 8:38 pm said:

A wire wheel on a drill would do this.

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Samuel Beeker on April 28th, 2011 at 12:48 am said:

I’d say dremel tool

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Michael Carlyle Shank II on April 28th, 2011 at 5:58 pm said:

I like the guess of wire wheel on a drill, but how about a weed whacker? Or what if the wire wheel only had one thin “spoke” of bristles to make it more weed-whacker-esque? Then the film could actually be shot in realtime, by matching the frame rate of the camera to the RPM of the drill or weed whacker, taking an image every moment that the “spoke” is out of the frame.

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Tommy Phillips on April 28th, 2011 at 8:49 pm said:

At least one of the shots made me pretty sure it was a Surform rasp … but it may have been different tools in different shots, depending on scale and material.

I do think a motorized tool would have spread fragments more than most of the items seem to show.

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Rob Lorraine on April 29th, 2011 at 4:24 am said:

This video may be of interest (or at least the end of it).

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