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!!!!
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