The Eye Doesn't Has It

 
The purpose of this clip was to try out the new pond water top layer that Christine and I installed on Tuesday. And to play with possible ways of revealing the Time Frog's eye in a dynamic way.

I don't think the clip is successful/useable but it did provide a lot of practical information and learning.

Getting to know what is possible, trying out different ideas, this 226 frame test clip, shot in reverse action, proves:

• My tracking has to get much more smooth and not jerk all over.

• I can pull focus and track (and refocus the camera) during a single stop mo shot.

• I can zoom, but I had better put some kind of increment marking to follow, that just moving it by hand without any measure, makes the zoom choppy.

• I can shoot action in reverse and use an application (thanks to Christine's suggestion) to rename all frames/files in a folder, reversing their sequence, so that Quicktime can assemble in the other direction. Christine used Renamer but that didn't work with my OS 10.6.8, so I bought one called A Better Finder REname 9 ($19.95) which did.

• Our new top layer of pond water (thanks to Nick Hilligoss' suggestion) looks much better (i.e.; less like a sheet of plastic being rippled) but we'll need to animate it much more slowly (less often) to get it more pond water like.

• I can't use the action of a ragged black border to burn the frame edges via batch process as it "boils", moves each frame, for some reason.

• The frog's clock hands are animatable but I have to be sure and close the trap door to access them on the side each time. In this clip it is flapping like a flag.

• Capturing the film at the proper higher resolution (as Nick and Mike kindly informed) means:

1. Minute globs of dried hot glue, tiedowns, eye reflections, window reflection, and stray cat hair become like boulders, as Mike warned.
2. The 3Drender action I like to run on my frames can't take a whole folder at once, PS crashes on my system. However, breaking them up, 10 frames in 22 separate folders, running the batch processing on each folder--and then reassembling the whole 226 into one folder again before converting to motion in Quicktime--does work.

This clip uses four passes of processing actions:

1. Resize to 1280 x 720 for editing (also ran a draft at full 1080 to see how it looked--a little to starkly flawed screened on a computer, projecting it onto a large screen at some point might blur it back into fantasy dreamy)
2. The Jeremy Birns 3D render for a toy camera effect that I love.
3. The raggged black border for a burned edge effect (to cover the gaps on the corners left by the distort of the above action.
4. I also used crude iMovie image adjustments to heighten the contrast and shift the white point toward blue range, as the raw footage looked too boring for me.

I added sound via iMovie (only editing app I currently have) I will note Nick's suggestion of using Partners in Rhyme for the actual film but opted for free mp3 files from Sound Jay for this quick test.

White Halo

This test clip experiments for the first time with:
Tracking shot in 2 speeds (1/8" and 1/16" on second half) Pretty good although a bit clunky on my part.

Flying rig removal on moth at end (have to watch my arm shadow & use another kind of support) SO EASY!!!!!

Far landscape seamlessly blended to pond set thanks to Christine's brilliant lighting idea.

Christine animated the moth in the first half, all of the water ripples, and all of the watch works turning.

I used three different layers of textures on the frames:
1. A light smear of Vasoline on the camera UV lens.
2. Jeremy Birn's Barrel Distortion and Chromatic Aberrations Action in PS.
3. White vignetting, addition of grain, and downsized to 990 pixels wide Action in PS.

Holy Holga!!!

Very happy to report I discovered a possibly batch processable image effect that brings the vintage camera look to my Halfland footage that I thought I never could.

It's a Fake Barrel Distortion and Chromatic Aberration PS action written by Jeremy Birn. I combined it with other actions to vignette the edges a bit in the above test still but feel what Jeremy has created will provide the film with the magical storybook feel I so wanted. Thank you, Jeremy.

The Color of Time

The equipment tests continue as we get closer to the look I'm after for the film.

This gets pretty darn close!

Above you see the finished Time Frog verdigris green patina puppet paint job (what else is the color of time?!) more clearly while the rest of the pond set has been blurred in camera with Vasoline© on the edges of the UV protection lens cover and then additionally enhanced in PS with a texture layer blended to multiply in green with burned out edges and erased over the frog.

Christine and I learned a tons in making today's test(s); how to gobo the window light to cut down the glare on the frog's left clock eye (above was my test with a paper watchface over his eye), that hot glue doesn't work on my set as tie down for his hands, that a piece of cardboard with a barcode on it allows us to focus on the plane of the frog's nose area instead of at the camera's field of center, that the pond water needs to stretch to make it more slack in order to ripple when touched between frames, the the whole set and room we are shooting in moves slightly regardless of how little we move--and/or the camera is somehow moving no matter how much we try to lock it down with every frame, that the shaking can be fixed in post production with Adobe After Effects, how to animate the Koi puppet with more minute movements and less often to get him swimming at a slower rate, that animating is far more fun than we thought it would be.

If you were here in the room with us, there is nothing you would rather do than make your own stop motion films.

Slurp

Trying to find out why on earth the earth moves during these tests. Mike kindly pointed out the unintentional shimmy.

This test is using the tripod head on smoothmover clamped to a piece of 1/2" plywood sitting on a crate on a sawhorse table next to the set sitting in a plastic tub.

(Previous test was the same only using a single tube articulated arm superclamped to a metal tray on the crate.)

Christine, who helped me finish prepping the set for this new test, and I figured the bounce of the arm was longer than the set's from the flexible floor moving. But now I'm thinking it's the set needing to be more secure, more firmly attached in place.

(It was also Christine's ingenious idea to create that green fuzzy painted faux fur cloth tacked at the back of the scene to fill in any gaps in any set up. She should patent that.)