Every year, Gettysburg creates a holiday video to celebrate the community and wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season. In 2024, to both problem solve for an exceptionally busy season where many members of the community who might typically be in the holiday video were not available for filming, and to find a new way to showcase the magic of the campus and community, I decided to do a stop motion animation. The stop motion features multiple scenes you would find around campus during the winter, including a few inside references to things that happened this semester, like an owl making campus its home, to portray the whimsy and warmth of the holiday season while still making it feel uniquely Gettysburg.

I storyboarded what scenes I could do that depicted the whimsy and magic of the College while still being recognizable as Gettysburg. Then, I made a list of everything that needed to be constructed, and how many versions of each I needed for the animation. I purchased craft supplies and hand-made all of the paper pieces used for the animation. 

Filming of the video consisted of setting up a top-down camera rig at the surface where I was completing the animation, then tethering my camera to Adobe Lightroom Classic so that I could have a live-view of each frame before I took the picture, and remote control of the shutter and all of my settings so that I wouldn’t have to physically touch the camera and risk bumping it. Then I took each photo - each frame - in Lightroom and exported out as a basic moving timeline before taking it into Adobe Premiere to do the finishing edits. I created a soundscape for each scene, adding more life and kineticism to it.

After watching the initial edit, I also decided that I didn’t want it to just start directly on the stop motion, so I shot the opening two shots of the sun setting over campus. I made a callback to the Gettysburg College holiday video I made two years ago, including the Pennsylvania Hall snowglobe, which also served as my transition into the stop motion “world.”

The video launched on the College’s Youtube channel in December 2024, as well as being sent out as part of an email campaign from the President’s Office to students, staff, and alumni.