Pushing Everyone Around

Just ham-fisting my way through the process of experimenting with equipment, small limited puppets, disco lighting, and generating GIF crossfade effects, i.e.; a learning curve.

It was a BIG day for me because, after years of having everything here to begin shooting scenes, I hadn't. Today, though, I did.

After trying to cajole myself into it for so long, I finally did it because several people I respect were waiting to see something from me—as in standing there in their own lives, looking at me to take the plunge into the filming all this.

Some people only like to build and never shoot their projects. Lighting and frame-by-frame animating would need to be more enjoyable for them to embark on those aspects. I considered that for myself too, but the same passion for seeing what I imagined for the story come to life when I started is still as in force today. And because it isn't an "entertainment" piece, more of a painting of a story that moves a bit, I had to be the one to take what I built and film, edit, and add effects and soundscape to it to get Halfland here.

It's a start. I learned so much today in getting things going. I got the camera positioned on the Manfrotto arm, hooked up the camera's power adapter, and discovered where to connect and use the shutter release (necessary to avoid even slightly moving the camera during animating). I learned how to make GIF's right in PS and then made fifty two billion GIFs and MP4's on the wonderful and popular ezgif.com, testing out compression for posting size limits here without it looking 8-bit, delay on frames, crossfade effect (my favorite magic ingredient, etc.

Things to still figure out (for this little addendum scene of a bug party) would be how to better compose the shots to include both the lighted party lanterns high above and the ground surface below to see the grass blades emerging and capture movement of several bug puppets in each angle. How do I reach those bug puppets to better grip them and articulate their little limbs and wings? How can items on the ground like mushrooms be firmly anchored to the floor so they don't move, just the puppets dining atop? And how to shift the focus from one bug partyer to another when the depth of field is so narrow with the 50mm lenses for a darkened moonlit set. 

I might return to my detailed macro lens set to see if I can rack the foci more effectively.

I'll also consider moving the bug puppets to the foreground of the ground surface set. For today's testing, they were at the back of it; see below.

You can see me seated on a footstool for three hours today, shooting over three hundred frames. The puppets were very far away from the camera's 50mm lens, which made it too difficult to reach them to animate. I was also shooting with only the camera, no video assist, without onion skinning. I had my S5 on the stop-motion setting, but the screen was too small for me to see enough of the motion. 

You can notice the 1.5" mirror ball on a rotating stem near the table on the right. That's an ultra-bright rechargeable miniature spotlight (see below for a closer view). It was wildly successful at delivering the miniature party lighting I hoped to get. I rotated the ball by hand on ones while moving the puppets on twos.

I say »moving the puppets» but in this case it isn't really moving the puppets, I know. These puppets are limited in motion; just a leg or antennae wiggle here or there is all that's possible. But if I can smooth out some of my challenges with the set and give myself better access to the puppets, I'll be able to arrive at a bug's bash in style.