Wanted to do a complete run through today, taking into account everything that I've learned so far - the good and the bad. I needed a full day to set up and run the sequence. I'd tried to start the other day and got interrupted which meant the light changed etc.
I tried again with the gorilla grip - to a chair, but you could still see the chair legs, in spite of the zoom. The trouble with having to zoom in in order to get rid of legs/handles or whatever the grip is attached to, is that you lose a lot of the A4screen size and therefore your shooting area. I then attached it to the side of my trolley, as opposed to the handles, which worked better.
I masked out the area (A4) that I wanted to shoot, in black gaffer tape directly onto my bedroom floor. This would make sure everything was in place and give me something to tape down photo, tissue paper and acetate layers.
Here you can see the black/white photo image, tissue paper and coloured acetate taped down. However, there were problems intially as I was trying to 'drop in' the tissue followed by the coloured acetate. Because I'd sellotaped the corners of the black & white photo onto the gaffer tape edges, I couldn't drop the final piece of the tissue and acetate and had to peel off the sellotape in order for them to slide under fully to the bottom. This meant running the risk of moving things about and ruining continuity, as sellotape is really hard to peel off gaffer tape!
I zoomed in to get the image full into my camera shot - this meant losing a little of the A4 size. I then marked off the actual area that showed in shot, onto the acetate with black marker pen. This way I knew where to place the rabbits and text to make sure they were in shot (as the area was smaller than A4)
This sequence had its fair share of problems, all of which drove me to distraction. At first all was going pretty well. I was being really careful moving things about and trying not to bang into the trolley or tripod grip when moving the cut-outs. I'd got the zoom where I wanted it and as long as you don't turn the camera off by mistake, it will stay on that zoom setting (even when it's goes into 'sleep' mode). Then the flipping camera battery went dead!! Not good... time for a break while I took it off the gorilla grip..
Problems occuring due to that...
It takes a good 40 mins for the battery to fully rechage (which I needed it
to do in order for it not to 'die' on my again. The light in the room had
therefore changed by the time I got back to it.
It's very difficult to reattach th camera onto the grip in exactly the same
place.
It's difficult to get the exact zoom setting again.
Still, these things are sent to try us, and I did my best to get everything back into the right place, even though it took a long time.
I took more 'same' shots this time so that some shots remained on screen for more than a split second, when the speech bubbles came in, for instance.
By the time the crayons started to appear I had to be really really careful. It's so easy to knock one out of place, or one will knock a rabbit out of place. So much has to be be moved. In order to combat this a little, I moved one or two things only in one shot.
It was very time consuming and laborious but needs to be done this way.
The two rabbits came in from each side, crayons ending up in their paws, which started to colour in the middle rabbit. This was a lot harder than it looked. There's not a very big area in which to work in for a start. Trying to draw with pastel is easier than in crayon, but the rabbits still move around, even when being held down. It's really hard to 'colour them in' on the flat like that. However, as this animation is supposed to have that 'hand made' feel to it, this shouldn't matter too much.
Other crayons came in and began to colour in the other two rabbits.
I made the crayons and two side rabbits disappear until eventually there was only the middle rabbit left. I wanted the frame to be fairly clear ready for the text boxes to appear.
At this stage there was room for a small text box and the middle rabbit. In order for their to be room for the next box, which was bigger, I moved the rabbit down the page.
until eventually that rabbit disappeared
leaving room for the Information text box. I took lots of same shot stills for each text box so they remain on screen for a few seconds, in order for the information to be taken in by the viewer.
Finally the orignal happy rabbit reappears with the website address and the logs appear also - lots of shots taken of each - same shots, with the rabbit moving only slightly to 'point at' each logo.
All in all I have taken 573 photos!!!! It has taken ages to transfer them onto my laptop and then memory stick. Have to have a lot of memory on all software for this kind of project. Hopefully there is enough here for a 30 - 60 second animation. I will put this into Premier Pro on Monday,......and then work out some effects, render etc., and upload it to my Blog...
No comments:
Post a Comment