Well, it's all wrapped up. Sorry I didn't update sooner, but I was busy with all the productions stuff. I'll try and pick up where I left off and bring you all up to date...
~ At this point, most everything is put together and it's time to get it ready for the animation shoot. That means I need to set it up in a place where I can get to all of the figures I need to animate as well as light it and film it.
~ A look at the beginnings of my animation stage.
~ I stacked up and glued together scraps of the pink foam from construction to use as stands for set pieces and figures to be placed on.
~ I had to tie all of the pieces together so that they couldn't be moved easily, so I used toothpicks to do that. Being that these are all made out of foam they are vey light and could easily be moved with a heavy sigh and that would really mess up a shoot if that happend in the middle of it all.
~ I used clamps to tie down figures that I didn't want moving around...
~ And I finally got around to painting the panels on to the ceiling piece. Had to use 2 coast of black acrylic to keep the brush strokes from showing when it was backlit.
~ Here's a view of the set with the new ceiling in place.
~ Having a little fun taking pics with the new ceiling.
~ More fun with new ceiling and working on lighting.
~ A friend made me this great lighting box. It's basically just 3 dimmer switches mounted in one box so I can easily adjust lighting for shots.
~ These are couple of Dollar Store LED lights that I use for everything. For this project I superglued pieces of curoplast onto the front to diffuse them -
should have done that years ago!So far on this project I have spent no money. It wasn't till I was getting ready to actually shoot that it came time to finally spend a little dough. I wanted to shoot this project in HD so I was gonna have to use my iPhone 4s to be able to do that, as the video camera I usually use can't do that. In order to do this, I was gonna have to upgrade my version of iStopmotion as well as my OS. So, after $60 and many new settings to reset I am ready to go with the new camera set up.
~ Here's a look at my DIY tripod mount for my iPhone. I can't zoom with this set up, so I used my telephoto lens to try and get closer to the action.
~ The telephoto lens is part of a set of magnetic lenses for smartphones that I got from
PhotoJoJo. I carry them around in a miniature SW lunchbox.
~ Everything is looking good so far!
~ Getting things ready to shoot.
~ Working on lighting.
~ As good as it was looking with the iPhone as my camera, I was having trouble getting close enough for the shot and doing my panning shot with my DIY tripod mount
~ So I was forced to revert back to my old video camera that doesn't have HD capabilities, but it does have zoom and a solid tripod mount.
~ Everything is all set, let's shoot!
After 3 hours of shooting (and cursing the fact that I chose a shot with a camera pan) I ended up with these 4 seconds of unusable footage:
<iframe src="
http://player.vimeo.com/video/49950814" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<a href="Not a valid vimeo URL">Empire Uncut: Scene 258 out take[/url][/color][/b]
The quality is low because I didn't bother to export a good quality copy, but I really messed up the camera pan and the lighting was not what I was going for at all.
Quick little insight to my process... I have to shoot all of this at night so that the movement of the sun during the day won't mess with my lighting over the course of a shot. As I like to put it, I prefer to work in darkness so that I can control the light. Now that I have used up all of about 2 hours of shooting time left and not having enough time to start over, I decided to just mess with the lighting and camera setting until I had everything dialed in and ready for my next night of shooting.
~ Here's a shot of what I came up with.
Pleased with my nights work, I decided to get some rest and prepare for when darkness would arise again and I could continue my project.
~ Let's try this again. Quiet on the set!!
~ It's a wrap!
Well, after all that, I got my 16 seconds of animation and scene 258 of Empire Uncut is in the bag. I can't say that I am totally pleased with the end product, but I do think it came out good and I had lot of fun making it. I hope you enjoy it...
<iframe src="
http://player.vimeo.com/video/49949053" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen></iframe>
<a href="Not a valid vimeo URL">Star Wars Uncut Scene 258[/url][/color][/b]
