Stopmotion – A second experiment

As mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to test two more features of Stop Motion Pro: painting on frames and easily duplicating frames.

Here’s the results:

Some notes:

• The video is played back at 17.5 frames per second.
• The boxer looks odd at the beginning of the special effects because he isn’t moving; I duplicated the frame of him crouching, when I should have had him moving in reaction to the ‘hits’.
• I copy and pasted existing frames for the breathing loop, which resulted in a weird lighting effect.
• I found it really helpful to ‘hide’ frames in Stop Motion Pro (none are deleted) to speed up certain sections and correct bad shots.

For my next experiment, I decided to try to:

• keep the lighting consistent between frames,
• keep the camera steady with the funky tripod,
• try to pan the camera in the film, and
• plan the film in advance, especially the timing.

Some notes:

• The video is played back at 10 frames per second to avoid boring my audience, but it would be more consistent with Tetris if it were slower (5fps).
• There are approximately 520 frames in the final video.
• I drew up a spreadsheet to plan the relative timings, e.g. how many frames before the piece drops, how far the piece can move per frame, what the line-removal sequence would be, etc.
• I created a (very short) program to randomly generate the order of the pieces.
• It took about 4 hours to shoot this.
• There are a few hidden frames, e.g. where I forgot to take the shot or to put in the next brick. I left the error in the beginning so I never forget again.
• Notice the light difference between the two videos in this post; the first shot during daytime even though the room was quite dark, and the second shot at night.

For my next experiment(s), it’s probably time to try harder stuff:

• Multiple characters/things moving in the shot.
• Setting up a light box.
• Panning the camera, or arranging the movie so that the camera moves from one fixed position to another.