Digital technology in some form or another has crept into many of our homes, but for Ben Stokes, a founder of the Chicago video production house H-Gun Labs, it’s been a real life-changer. A decade ago, when he made his first video for Ministry as a fledgling out of the School of the Art Institute, Stokes labored long and hard over old-fashioned “in-camera” effects and optical printing to achieve the visuals he had in mind. But when he plotted a similar stop-motion sequence for Meat Beat Manifesto last year, his approach couldn’t have been more different. “I put 34 still cameras around Jack Dangers, and then we took hundreds of stills as he rotated,” says Stokes. The dizzying montage that resulted is punctuated randomly by feathers, chains, flying debris, and fragments of stereo equipment. “We digitalized the images, fed them into the computer. What we got was an illusion of motion, an elaborate effect that ended up not costing a whole lot of money to make.”
