SF Bay Area Commercial Photographer — Stop Motion Preview
Stop Motion, Drones, and a Pixel Stick
After an awesome stop-motion shoot with Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer and her nineteen top executives, I came away genuinely fired up about the creative possibilities of stop motion. So last Saturday I got together with some buddies to geek out and experiment — specifically with drones and a Pixel Stick.
We crashed the drone pretty quickly — about 20 feet up, so not catastrophic — and shifted to working with just the Stick for the rest of the session. We're just scratching the surface of what's possible with this stuff, but I'm loving it. I can't wait to bring it into my work and push things to a new level. The possibilities are genuinely exciting.
If you want some visual fuel for your imagination, watch this Cirque du Soleil drone video — it's a great example of where this technology can go creatively.
P.S. The drone is repaired and ready for new adventures.
Stop Motion and Commercial Photography in San Francisco
The Marissa Mayer shoot was a reminder of how technically demanding stop motion is — and how different the rhythm of that work is from portrait or editorial photography. It's frame-by-frame, painstaking, and the margin for error at any individual frame is invisible until the sequence plays back. But the underlying discipline is exactly the same: light, framing, and knowing what belongs in the frame and what doesn't.
Tools like the Pixel Stick push that creative territory further — light painting combined with stop motion opens up a whole range of visual possibilities that straight photography can't touch. The drone adds a spatial dimension on top of that. Even a crashed drone session produces ideas worth keeping.
As a commercial photographer in San Francisco working across still photography, stop motion, and video, this kind of Saturday experimentation is where a lot of the best ideas start. The Cirque du Soleil video above is a good benchmark for where drone and motion work can go when the production is fully realized — worth watching if you haven't seen it.
Commercial Photographer in San Francisco — Still, Stop Motion, and Motion
The line between commercial photography and moving image has thinned considerably. Clients who commission still photography increasingly want stop motion, social content, and animated sequences alongside the core deliverables. Stop motion in particular occupies a strong niche in Bay Area commercial production — especially for tech brands and consumer products that want something handcrafted and visually distinctive.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a commercial photographer and professional photographer based in San Francisco, available for still photography, stop motion production, and motion work across the Bay Area. For commercial photography in San Francisco, contact Marc through the website to discuss your project.
