stopmotion blog report 4

shooting stage

we have set up our first set on top of two tables pushed together as to not hurt ourselves by staying on our knees for hours on end whilst shooting. also since there are black paper walks surrounding our sets set up, i found out we could use that to our advantage, originally we would have to have opened and closed the walls of the set each time we moved the characters , which would have taken a very long to do, but instead we moved the set next to it but leaving a gap so i could fit in and change the poses of the characters between frames, then altered the lighting as to make it appear to be a backing to the stage/ have less shadows, saving us allot of time.

character posing

we have decided that i would pose/animate the characters while Chris would operate the camera and also see in there was to fast of a movement between frames.To my benefit I did the actions the characters would do myself, just to get the idea of the relative movements in a single scene/ series of movements.

alternative story

we have decided to change the story mildly due to both time constants and the misfortune that the police cant stand up and walk without being consistently held due to their weight distribution and short legs, now the chase scene is shorter and from a different angle so i can hold them up when Chris takes a shots.

dragon frame

for this stage in production we are using a program called dragon frame to help us make this stop motion look better, this is done by using onion skin, which is when two layers, the one you currently are shooting and the previous one are overlapped so you can see the difference, this helped allot since i wasn't always aware if the characters have moved to much between frames, that in post would have given the film a very "jumpy" appearance.