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.