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.