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!!!
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