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.