Stopmotion: Take 3! The final take for this shot!!!!

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!

Stopmotion: Take 2

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!

Stopmotion: Some Adjustments

  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!!!

Stopmotion: My first real stopmotion thing!!

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. 

Stopmotion: Lighting tests

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. 

Stop Motion: Face Set

  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!