With less than two weeks left for the hand in of our Master film assignment, a lot of the production process went on without further updating through this website. To make up for this inconvenience, here follows a summary of what happened the past two months.
Studio set-up
Some photos to show the set-up of the mini studio. Resourcefulness is key here.
In a small room in the attic, a small constructed table served as a base for the animation table. I used two plates of perspex (plexiglass) and layered them above each other with small transparant boxes from model cars of Tintin.
At the bottom lay a white sheet of paper, some boxes with LED strips on top for the lighting, making it like a light box. On the lower plate was a sheet of chalk paper, to diffuse the LED light. The lower plate was elevated with 8 transparent boxes, stacked up in two levels. The upper plate was stacked with one level of boxes, with 3 to 4 boxes across the plate.
Studio set-up
Some photos to show the set-up of the mini studio. Resourcefulness is key here.
In a small room in the attic, a small constructed table served as a base for the animation table. I used two plates of perspex (plexiglass) and layered them above each other with small transparant boxes from model cars of Tintin.
At the bottom lay a white sheet of paper, some boxes with LED strips on top for the lighting, making it like a light box. On the lower plate was a sheet of chalk paper, to diffuse the LED light. The lower plate was elevated with 8 transparent boxes, stacked up in two levels. The upper plate was stacked with one level of boxes, with 3 to 4 boxes across the plate.
Two main LED spots served as main lighting, facing down on parts of styrofoam, and bounced gently back to the upper plate. Behind the light tripods, there were two more tripods for the camera setup : a copper tube was fixed with grip heads, a third grip head held a spigot (tap) that was attached to the camera.
I used Dragonframe for capturing the footage and for that, I used my brother's Canon 5D Mark II for the shooting, switching between two lenses :
- f1.8, 50mm
-f4, 24-105mm
Animation
I have chosen to primarily animate on ones and a few shots were shot on twos. The animation was done on the upper plate, with paper cut-outs and tea leaves. In some shots, more depth was created in this mostly 2D dimension space by adding and animating some tea leaves on the lower plate. This time consuming work, as such shots took about 6 minutes to prepare one frame, payed off in the long run.
Sound
Sound recordings were done in the small sound studio at LUCA. There was foley of the characters, the internal and the external forces coming from the environment and what was happening between the characters. Some of the materials that were used for recording included cycling shoes, a zinc plate, ball, scrapes of wood, a metal brush etc.
There is no music score made, as the focus has to lie on the actions of the characters themselves, rather than be carried away by mood sketching music. However, a chord with ethereal-like sounds will give a harmonic impression, to reinforce the ending.
Preview imagery