My first ever stop motion short movie…
Soundtrack – The Imperial March by John Williams.
Sound effects from soundbible.com
Edited using Photoshop CS5.
Animated using Windows Live Movie Maker.
Behind the Scenes
My “set” and my make-shift tripod. I had to improvise the tripod because the subjects were too low for a normal tripod. Unfortunately that meant none of the images were taken from the same angle. So I had to spend days aligning each of those photos on Photoshop.
The other problem I faced was the lighting. Because my set was illuminated by natural light, it depended on the whims of the clouds & the sun. Hence, the variations in lighting. & colours as well. Because my camera has no manual control, the exposure and focus was different for every photo.
The hardest part was of course editing everything on Photoshop. Take 250 photos and align each one over another by looking for common points. That turned out into 9GB of PSDs. Imagine how slow that can be on a 8.5-year-old PC.
What I could have done to help the positioning is use black & white markers on the set extremities.
In hindsight, if I had constructed a proper set with wallpaper background, level ground and artificial lighting, my workflow would have been much faster. Well, for a first time, that’s not too bad. But I’m never doing a stop motion movie again… not with this camera or PC at least.
The fake Lego minifig has finally been exterminated… I now have an original LEGO minifig mascott. A Darth Knight. :)
PS. There exists a massive online LEGO stop motion community – Bricks in Motion.
Here’s an example of what a “pro” stop motion video looks like…
6 comments
Man, kant mo guet sa, mo ena 1 sel zaffaire pu dir :
Truver to dans congé!!! lol
"Take 250 photos and align each one over another by looking for common points."
Isn't there something called "stacking" that does it automatically?
Yes, I forgot about the Auto-Align layers feature. :S
Geez, the pros are really pros !!!
I thought of you this morning while reading an article about the space probe Juno that has been sent to Jupiter:
"The spacecraft also carries three LEGO figurines representing Galileo, the Roman god Jupiter and his wife Juno. [...] The third LEGO crew member, Galileo Galilei, has his telescope with him on the journey.
Although most LEGO toys are made of plastic, LEGO made these figures of aluminum to endure the extreme conditions of space flight."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft)#Galileo.27s_plaque_and_LEGO_figurines
Another giant leap for Lego-kind. :)
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