Christmas 2020!

https://youtu.be/iXGBXjnJftA

 

Well! Here's the longest Stopmotion video I've ever done. It took two years to do Dasos (with a full time job) and only a month to do this. I made Anerin breath, and honestly, I think it looks great!!! I animated snow falling out the window, which was completely a last second decision. It looks okay. It's quaint and kind of charming. With more time, I definitely could have come up with a better system for it. The camera movement is good, but when it turns to keep Anerin in the center, it gets all jumpy. I hate the hand movements for her when she's checking out her claws, but I needed filler gags for the 2:30 minute long speech Santa gives. All her eye rolls are great! I'm happy-ish with the growling. I didn't realize the christmas tree was going to be dead center behind her the whole time. It's great for framing her in the lighting, but the tree is so pretty! I guess it has to be this way since the lights on the tree are way too bright for the scene. 

Next year I'd like all the shorts to be one continuous story. I want to start off with her assistant in the city before they've met. That would be fun. Not sure how many videos I'll be able to do. If I never get a job again, I can do 7 or 8 more two minute long videos. I'm working all of January and there's talk of me doing a minute long stop motion commercial for one of my friends maybe around late Feb or March. If I do get a job I might just go back to little experiments or maybe two 5 minute long animations for all of 2021. Who knows!!

Happy Thanksgiving 2020!

 

 Hello! I finished this quick one well in time for thanksgiving. It took three weeks; one week for making Gobbles, one week for the set, and one week for filming. Not too bad. I'm going to post a green screen lesson for you soon. That was by far the biggest challenge on this one. Keying out green when there is yellow, red, black, and blue in the screen was incredibly difficult!!!!!

Lets Talk YouTube

 

 I uploaded a new video to the channel. This one is a behind the scenes look at how the Fox Witch stuff is made. It's a little over 10 minutes long, almost doubling the length of time my channel has available. My goal is to try to get monetized on YouTube. I need 4,000 public watch hours and 1000 subscribers. I think the watch hours will come naturally over time... but 1000 subscribers?! That's a tall order. I have confidence though. Each time I see a 10 year old kid unboxing a flashlight with 110K views, I feel okay about it. 

To date, I have 37 subscribers and 12 watch hours. Not much you say. But think about it. I've only been live for a few months. My channel only has 7 videos with a total of 12 minutes of watch time! My longest non-making of video is 2:36. Most of them are only half a minute long! Think of how many times people have to watch such short little videos to get 12 hours!!! So I'm looking very optimistically about this!

The next thing I'm working on is an 18 second long thanksgiving day message. Once everything is done being made (puppet, set, lighting) I hope I can crank out one or two more for the month of November. The set is literally going to just be fake autumn leaves from Hobby lobby or whatever I can find, with a blue background. If it takes two weeks to make (it's November RIGHT NOW!!) then maybe I'll just do two videos. 

Anyway, it's fun doing all this and I guess I'm thankful for having all the time in the world to do this!

Stay safe! Stay Healthy! 

Halloween 2020 Message!

 

The next video is up on YouTube! 

https://youtu.be/iK_EijQ60z8

As you can see, my animation is getting better, but is far from perfect. The movements are often coming too late, making the audio seem off... which it's not. I LOVE when she rolls her eyes when she says "Door to Door" but the first 10 seconds it looks like the audio isn't matching. Mouth choices aren't great yet combined with movements that are starting into the words that are the emphasis words and not before. The movement should crescendo when the audio for the word crescendos. 

The Vixen's Cauldron Now up to view!!!

 

https://youtu.be/iySM-UiHLhY

I finished my next piece just in time to premiere it on October 1st! I hope you enjoy it! I want her to be a recurring character. The first of a few. Her 3D printed parts worked great! Blinking is still a bit of a pain, but far superior to sticking clay onto an eye. Her eyes worked PERFECTLY!!! I just had to print them a little bit smaller than I originally planned to get the eyelids to fit as well. The hair was from a huge pony toy. Luckily they had one with silver hair. Even with the fan turned on, it was never a problem. I got better with animating her as I went on. This is the second take that I had done. Each take took 8 hours from start to finish. I couldn't bring myself to do a third take. I really should have though. This animation is the best I've done so far, but it's still only close to being good. 

I'm going to do a short Halloween message with her next and post that on the 26th, hopefully. It shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to use the same set and the same lighting. It should just be a matter of writing and recording dialogue, assigning the face set to it, then filming it in a take or two.

I'm not sure if anyone goes to this blog anymore. If you do, please comment! I'm considering taking it down due to lack of interest. 

Thanks! 

Stop Motion: Terra Magma

 https://youtu.be/bfDvCogVeKQ

Terra Magma is finally finished! Thank you Maria Stuckey for the wonderful title! I kept just calling it "Lava" but that just didn't sit right with me. Thanks to Ellee Gilley for the use of her green screen background. I'm so happy that my little ship kept working throughout the whole shoot. 

The New YouTube Channel!!!!

 Hello all 25 of you that follow this blog! I started a YouTube channel under the Sculptwerks name!

Here's a link!!! Please watch, like and subscribe!!!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0fmLB1VjUYdNX2wZHsfc7A

Stopmotion: slow blur!

     As I filmed water, I knew I needed a whole bunch of angles and takes just to give myself enough material to edit down later. One of the shots I tried that didn't make the cut was a slow blur into frame. In animation you can film on the twos (12 frames of movement for 24 frames per second). This can be used to acheive a slow motion effect. Sometimes you can animate on the threes! Well, I thought it would be cool to very very slowly come into focus over a few seconds, but it's easier said than done when each second is whipping by at 24 frames. I'm adjusting the focus ring on my camera by hand, keep in mind. 
     I tried on the twos and it went by way too fast. It was also a fast stop. Nothing smooth about it. I skipped the threes and (stupidly) tried to move it just once every 5 frames! That produced a transition that would start and stop very abruptly. 
     The video above is this done correctly. I had used the notches that were already in the focus ring on the camera to judge the distance to move it. But what I needed to do, and what I DID do above, is measure the start and stop distance (one inch exactly). I divided that by 3 seconds of filming, which is 72 frames. Then I divided that in half, because I knew I could get away with filming on the twos. So in one inch I needed 36 marks. I went into Photoshop and made 36 lines that were equi-distant to each other and then scaled it down to 1 inch and printed it! I taped it to my camera and VIOLA!!! 

Here's the setup. I used a post-it note because it's an opaque sticker that's easily cut and readily available!

Stopmotion: Water!

Here's the next one! Water! Maria, my lovely wife, was kind enough to read a poem so this piece could have a little more going on than just visuals. 

I'm really enjoying the Adobe creative suite. It's really thought out and jives well together. I can't wait to start putting keyed out green armature stands in my stopmotion stuff! 

I really wanted to mask out the background and add in sky. I could have done that in a second in After effects had I only filmed this in front of a key green background. The clear water makes that very difficult now, unfortunately. I think the drywall background is killing this piece. But I just remind myself, it's an experiment. Using shrink wrap for water works great! I really like how the bubbles look too. They're just a series of hot glue on cut out acetate. I learned that water, ironically, can be chaotic and still read as water. Fire, on the other hand, needs to flow and move gracefully. I would have thought the opposite true. 

Stopmotion: I'm Still here!

  I've had more time, working from home, to get stop motion stuff cranked out. I did two more fire tests, started learning Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects and made a nice little video of all three fires together with explanations. Hopefully the video above loads. It's only 1 minute or so long, but it's a 79mb file! That just seems big to me.

Stopmotion: FIRE!!!

Well, I managed to finish my Dasos intro on time. All the sound effects are there and at some point I'll post it. For now, I hate it. It really looks like someone's first attempt at stop motion. I learned alot and now I want to move on to 2020 being the year of little tests and experiments! To start with, February can be FIRE month!! Here's a rotation around a camp fire using 12 different fire pieces. It's a pretty intense fire. I'd like to have a dark blue background and maybe some foreground grass rotating with the dirt. It'll be fun to play with over the next few weeks.