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Well, I did it! I actually managed to get this 'finished' by christmas! Of course, I still want to add music, sound effects, my logo in the beginning, the title at the end..... but the hardest part is over!!!! I learned A LOT from making this! The plan now is to take the entire next year doing little stopmotion studies. I want to learn how to photoshop stuff out of the movies frame by frame so I can remove rigs and stuff just like the professionals.
Some of the lessons.
- No windows!!! All the lighting fluctuations are from the sun popping in and out of the clouds outside despite the sun blocking curtain in place. If you have a window, you have to physically cover it with cardboard or something solid.
- LED lights only!!! My little highlight flashlight for the tree and fence kept burning through batteries. About six batteries in total. That's another reason for the lighting being as crazy as it is. My LED flashlight? Never used up it original batteries. Ideally, don't have any lights on batteries. Just use LEDs with color filters to get the warmth you want.
- Step-able camera rig. My next camera rig will have gears and some measurable way of advancing the camera along the axis. Every single pan or boom or zoom is jumpy and not great looking. I did it all by hand and I just eyed it all. Not a great strategy over the course of hundreds of frames.
- Dont go magnet to magnet. The mouths all used tiny neodinium magnets. This, overall, worked just fine, but I had them attach bare magnet in the mouth to bare magnet in the head. In hind sight, I'm just making changing out the mouth physically harder than it needs to be and I changed out the mouth about a thousand times during this whole thing.
- Keep it simple. Until I learn how to do post process editing frame by frame, I need to stick to simple wire armatures. Picture hanging wire seems to be the best balance between strength and flexibility so far. I also need to learn how to make good armatures. The metal ball and socket thing looks great and should work fantastically, but in reality (for me) all the joints fall loose and theirs no way to access the screws during shooting to tighten them.
I'm going to make a plan for next year. Maybe I'll have one goal for each month. I want to buy an SLA printer and make custom muzzle mouths. I don't plan on doing too much animation with humans to be honest. I want to try and animate fire, smoke and water. I need to get better with movement in general. I'll probably be learning that for the rest of my life. I want to make a head with movable eyes and (hopefully) eyelids that also are movable inside. So much to do! So exciting!!!!
This is the first time I'm seeing everything I've done so far together. I'm amazed at how well the fog/cloud transition worked. It's perfect!
Unfortunately, that's the only positive I can take away from this. It looks so much more clunky and amateurish than I had imagined it to look. He's so damn jittery when he talks. There's nothing smooth about any of it. I guess it looks exactly like what it is: someone's first attempt at stop motion. At least the set and the lighting is top notch.
The next shot is the longest, but also one of the easiest. He just pulls three letters out of the bag and smiles at the camera. I'll probably cut to a different angle for the third letter.
After that the very final shot is the exit shot out to the mountains again, which I've already filmed.
Once this is all done, I'm looking forward to spending the next year doing little test animations and experiments. I want to flush out some furry characters I've been wanting to do. A old green fox witch is one of them. Plus, I'd like to animate characters that don't just sound like me but louder.
It took 5 hours, but this is the first take of scene 3. I'm actually really happy with it. I think it could be a bit smoother, but honestly I don't know if I want to do it all over again. We'll see in a few days. It's been wonderful having the whole week off. I'm making weeks of progress in only a few days!
So, I burned through more flashlight batteries on my filament bulb flashlight. That's why the tree gets slightly brighter about half way through. I also realised I couldn't have him sit completely upright because I framed the tree directly above him. I refuse to have tangents like that!!!! It all reads well, though. I'm confident that I can cut on the action at the end of him opening the bag and that will transition smoothly into him looking into the tunnel of mail.
.... I hope.
Well, I like this one better. I drilled the hole for his wire mount so that he can shift forwards and backwards, which helped convey struggling a lot better. Well... at all...
I took the whole week off, so I'm going to work on this Monday - Wednesday, 8 hours a day. Then, of course, thanksgiving is Thursday.
I'm not in love with this shot. My second set of batteries burned out on the foreground tree. you can see the tree light back up when the camera stops panning. I think LED flashlights are the way to go from here on out. They last something like 30 hours straight. To be fair to the filament bulb, I am using batteries that we used during Halloween.
Also, right when the camera stops panning, the whole frame shifts. This is because I scratched the paint off the center of the upper lip, transitioning mouths because I didn't bother cutting my damn finger nails. When I got up to paint the face, I slammed my back against the camera crane. After a half hour of trying I got it lined back up as best I could. Lesson: trim your nails before shooting. Also, always be incredibly careful as to where you occupy space.
As always, the running is horribly animated. I have almost no control once the puppet has no legs to support itself. A professional would have the puppet supported with a massive rig that travels straight up and out of the frame. That rig would either be keyed out or photoshoped out or whatever. I THINK that kind of stuff is done in After Effects, but I'm not sure. I'm just trying to do everything in-camera right now.
For the first project I've ever done, it's good enough. I have three okay shots to choose from. I can't spend 10 more months screwing around with one shot. I'd rather just keep moving. I'm not winning any film festival awards for a Rankin Bass parody anyway.
So, yeah. Over a month and I only have one more good take to show for it. I did two more takes in between this one and the last. The first one I hit the camera with my shoulder by accident and never could find the right position again. The second one, the puppet slid way down and I couldn't ever get him to get back up again. I don't love this one. It's passable I guess. It's better than the horrible first take. I'm going to try one more time to give myself another shot at doing it right. It's not just the stiff camera boom and pan. It's not just the awkward, slow animation, it's also that he slids down the whole time and I can't control where he pivots. It's very frustrating. A real professional would have a huge key green rig that holds him up and would just get taken out in post. I don't know how to do that.
Yeesh. This is rough. The pan down and across are nice, but everything after that is a bit of a massacre. I also lost my fill flashlight on his body, which sucks. The batteries died or something. I ran downstairs and put in the other only two D batteries we own in it, but they didn't work either. Bulb might be burned out.
Anyway! This was just a test run. I didn't think I'd come flying out the gate on my first try and nail it. I'm going to film this one four times or so to try and get it good. Or at least, not so crappy.
Well, I've failed massively at providing a blog that can help people on their way into stopmotion if I can't even be bothered to update it regularly.
Here's the short version of what I've been up to.
I spent weeks making custom legs and arms for SDS out of metal ball sockets and sandwiched between custom metal brackets.... They failed because the bolts would loosen themselves over time. He's a very small puppet, so lifting up the thick felt to access bolts and screws is very difficult. The solution KEEP IT SIMPLE. I went back to the original wire armature that I had replaced. It's simple and not much can go wrong.
I finished lighting the set! Keep in mind, the lighting has to match the establishing shot (done early last year). The pan from the establishing shot goes right into this shot.
I used some old non-LED flashlights to help direct sunlight onto the foreground tree and help light SDS a little bit more.
Above, you are watching my second test shot to determine length, get a feel for the timing, get a feel for the new camera crane etc etc. SDS doesn't have hands yet. They're downstairs awaiting a third and final coat of paint. I realized I needed his hands to bend 90 degrees to look more like he's holding the bag. I think I'll drill the bag down tomorrow and start testing the animation of him struggling with it.
Tee hee!
We're at 4 months with this set build. It's almost done! I just need to paint the muddy water, add more grass, another row of trees on the very end, tie up the lefthand background perspective (not shown here) paint and hang the sky, and light the whole thing.....
Well, it's almost, almost done....
I'm working on the set for the second shot. I need barb wire fence and found that gluing tiny wire pieces to the wire fence works quite nicely! A bit stylized, but communicates the barb wire well!
The next shot is complicated for a bunch of reasons. There's a real background, the camera movement is infinitely more complicated, I have to build a whole set. I'm sure the list is longer than I can think of right now. I spent last weekend building a camera crane from scratch. I need to pan down (finishing the establishing pan) then move the camera over and into the main character as he struggles to move the heavy bag of letters. I found a great video on youtube:
https://youtu.be/YF9FcSiL0Ho
edu Puertas has been a great resource! His videos are a well I've barely tapped into! I watched the one up above and simplified his version for my own purposes. Mine isn't controlled by Adruino's and engines, but it should (hopefully) serve my purposes. In fact, I'm hoping this will serve as my main rig from now on! It's all nuts and bolts I can tighten and loosen as I need. Everything seems smooth enough movement-wise.
I went to skycraft and bought bearings and steel square tubing, then went to Lowes and got a bunch of 3/4 inch wide aluminum bars. The rest of it is wood. When I assembled it, it became immediately apparent that It needed a really heavy base, so I cleaned and prepped one of the Train track steel plates I had laying around. I even JB welded lego plates to the bottom to make it level and now I can add and remove wheels whenever I want!
I built a 3' x 5' table and now I need to build the snowy forest scene on top of it!
It's done! I love it! No weird head vibration when he talks, no bed sheet seam visible in the background! Clean and better animated. Wooo!
The next scene requires a whole 4x8 table to build on. I have to ask my wife if it's okay to convert the guest bedroom!
Here's the new take on the same scene:
You'll notice that it pans forwards smoothly. That's thanks to youtube videos suggesting a Lego Rig moved at 1/4 cm per frame. He also blinks now! Again, I sought out youtube to advise me on blinks. I went with a two frame blink, an eyelid slightly showing and a full eyeylid. I tried focusing on tiling the head from side to side instead of rotating it from side to side (if that makes any sense).
Although I'm really happy with this, I have to do it just one more time. There's some head vibration I'd like to get rid of but most of all I can't stand that the bottom edge of the sky shows so blatantly at the end. This is because instead of zooming in with the lense, I'm physically moving the camera into the letters tube.
Bah!
I know these photos are a bit dark, but the lighting in that room isn't great. Day two of the shoot, I've modified the camera tripod. Firstly, if you're shooting on carpet... DONT. I originally wanted the entire third scene to have a slow zoom into SDS' face. I had to stop because turning the lense to zoom incrementally each frame was causing the camera to go all sorts of crazy places. This was, I think, because of three problems:
Firstly, the carpet lets the tripod sink and shift at will. Getting it back on track each frame isn't impossible, but it eats up valuable time and isn't smart. I SHOULD have known this. I had learned this lesson from the first establishing shot which was all camera movement and nothing else..... but I guess I got lazy. I solved this (hopefully) by putting a piece of plywood down and hot gluing pieces of wood around each leg so nothing can shift.
Secondly, the tripod knobs weren't tightened. No wonder the camera wanted to shift, nothing was secure!!! I think because I knew this was going to be a test run, I didn't care about taking my time and doing things right. I was too excited about puppeting a stopmotion puppet! So I tightened everything that I could on the tripod. I even took off the neck strap so there would be less in the way of the cords and me.
Thirdly, the tripod is a lightweight aluminum one. That means the heavy-ish Canon Rebel T1i is making the whole thing top heavy. A lot of sway happens with this setup and keeping things tight gets harder. As you can see above I corrected this with a large magnet and 5 railroad spikes to weight the bottom. I had to do this for the opening shot, but thought I could get away with not doing it since the camera doesn't actually have to move.
I also did some touch up painting on the face of SDS. The first frame last night, I chipped paint off with my fingernail. If you look at the video the left side of his lip has a little black mark. That's another lesson: sculpt your characters with same colored sculpey so they're inherently colored. That way scuff marks and chips wont show so bad.
Tomorrow night, I'm ready to film again!!!
Here's the third shot! It's the first time I've ever really truly animated in stop motion. I did my logo run cycle years ago, but I feel like this is the first legit real go at it!
Don't worry, this is my first test run. I'm going to redo this scene a few times this week and animate it better. I'd like his bending down into the bag to be smoother, the camera work needs to be smoother as well. I want to put a big flat board down under my tripod so the zoom can be a little better.
Here's the evolution of the third shot (2nd to be filmed). Maria and I decided to go with the fourth lighting set up, with dark blue. The establishing shot is clearly depicting all this happening before even the sun comes up, so I'm happy going a bit dark on this. I'm really happy with the letters tube and the push on lot's of color! The incandescent light in the room is very happily casting that little orange at the edge of the mail! Perfect for a newly rising sun!
Don't worry the other shots will be a bit brighter. This needs to be dark because the camera is looking up from the bottom of his dark cold bag of letters to Santa.
I'm finally back in the game after the distraction of the holidays! Tonight I watched a Youtube tutorial showing me how to upload dialogue to Dragonframe and set lip sync images to it. That set of faces is called a 'Face Set', and it looks like Dragonframe lets you upload custom ones! Above is the face set for my character. These are all of the important mouth positions that my stop motion book depicted. It seems like you just compile these into one photoshop layered file (hopefully just a .psd).
Wish me luck!
