they become great friends later
So hey, here's the short stop-motion animation thing I mentioned I made the other night. Basically, we had the nice camera and I still have those failed attempts at cake toppers sitting around the apartment and I thought "Hey! Those little dudes + camera = stop motion!"
Brian did the color correcting because he's great ♥.
It was super fun to make and I'm pretty excited about trying out more projects. This one was really easy - I mean, yeah, there's no sound and it's not great (and you can see me in a couple shots), but it took a few hours to put together and it works really well, I think! I did a very not-complicated outline sketch of what I wanted to do and mapped out the figures' paths in pencil on the table (very specific for the first 9-ish seconds, and then a lot looser for the last 6-ish). The first part, with the all-white figure just moving down the table was sort of the whole point of the test run, and mapping it out precisely really helped a lot. I figured I wanted it to move across the table in about ten seconds, and then I did math until I could get the closest approximation (which turned out to be moving about a quarter of an inch per frame). After scooting that guy down the table for 100+ pictures, I had a good feel for how far the figure should go to move at that pace, and then I just put little marks around the candles to indicate where I wanted them to be in half-second (or six frames) intervals. And I didn't stick to that really super closely, but the funny thing is that chasing-around-the-table bit looks a lot better than the first part. But that's also probably because something is actually happening. Who knows!
Next up in projects is trying to figure out how to work with / make figures with moving parts and expressions. I don't know how difficult it would be to work with clay, and just buying a bunch more of these little dudes and painting different expressions on them seems like an OK thing to test with, although that might be pretty difficult, too, if we have to swap out an entire figure to change a facial expression. Little differences in placement/orientation show up a lot, even in a twelfth of a second.
Anyway. Stay tuned for updates for reals, because I super enjoyed making this and will be making more, holy cow.
Brian did the color correcting because he's great ♥.
It was super fun to make and I'm pretty excited about trying out more projects. This one was really easy - I mean, yeah, there's no sound and it's not great (and you can see me in a couple shots), but it took a few hours to put together and it works really well, I think! I did a very not-complicated outline sketch of what I wanted to do and mapped out the figures' paths in pencil on the table (very specific for the first 9-ish seconds, and then a lot looser for the last 6-ish). The first part, with the all-white figure just moving down the table was sort of the whole point of the test run, and mapping it out precisely really helped a lot. I figured I wanted it to move across the table in about ten seconds, and then I did math until I could get the closest approximation (which turned out to be moving about a quarter of an inch per frame). After scooting that guy down the table for 100+ pictures, I had a good feel for how far the figure should go to move at that pace, and then I just put little marks around the candles to indicate where I wanted them to be in half-second (or six frames) intervals. And I didn't stick to that really super closely, but the funny thing is that chasing-around-the-table bit looks a lot better than the first part. But that's also probably because something is actually happening. Who knows!
Next up in projects is trying to figure out how to work with / make figures with moving parts and expressions. I don't know how difficult it would be to work with clay, and just buying a bunch more of these little dudes and painting different expressions on them seems like an OK thing to test with, although that might be pretty difficult, too, if we have to swap out an entire figure to change a facial expression. Little differences in placement/orientation show up a lot, even in a twelfth of a second.
Anyway. Stay tuned for updates for reals, because I super enjoyed making this and will be making more, holy cow.