Objects At Rest

explorations in audio and moving imagery

Author: Grant

  • A Day in the Life…Move Puppet, Click, Repeat

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    Forty years ago today Sgt. Pepper was released. My favorite tracks are Getting Better, Lovely Rita, and A Day in the Life. The album is going to be on repeat as my background music when I work on Vitruvius later today. I think Justin and Shel may put videos on in the background when animating. I prefer the tunes. What is your background media of choice when you animate?

    P.S. I’ve been busy getting through about 9 minutes of footage since my last post. I’m about half way through now. Must…keep…animating.

  • Curtain Test Video: Updated

    Update. I did another test tonight and got the motion smoothed out. This is more of the effect I was aiming to achieve.

    Here is my original post and first test:
    Another test clip. I am finishing the assembly of the stage curtain and wanted to see how it would animate. The answer…not as smooth as I would like. But at least I got to test some lighting, framing, and curtain behaviors to adjust for the real shoot.

  • Armature Test Clip 2

    I did another test tonight. I am thinking that this armature is a bit unstable and has some spring to it compared to a wire armature secured with epoxy putty. I may have to make an epoxy version of the same proportions and try similar tests to confirm which is more stable for movement.

    With this armature, when you move any limbs or the head the torso starts trying to move with it and then springs back. The epoxy armatures for Vitruvius and Damocles felt more solid in that respect.

  • Armature Test Clip

    I filmed a quick test tonight using my recent armature design. Here is the result:

  • Video: Frame Rate and a Fix for the Ghosting Effect

    In both Man Drawing a Reclining Woman and the Sword of Damocles I have what looks like ghosting in the animation. My process is to shoot 12 photos for each second of animation then stretch that sequence in Sony Vegas to 24fps. Vegas then blurs every other frame. When analyzing the footage within Vegas frame by frame I would see one clean frame followed by blended frame composed of the the previous frame and the next frame.

    What I found out a few months ago is a setting in Sony Vegas called “disable resample” which eliminates the blending and will render each frame cleanly. The result is that every frame is shown twice with no blending. The default in Vegas is set to resample which blends every other frame automatically for image sequence clips. I still haven’t found a way to disable it permanently but in the meantime I am re-mastering my films to remove the ghosting. Jason, on a thread for a related topic at the stopmotionanimation.com forum, mentions the same fix in Adobe Premier by unchecking “blend speed changes”.

    Here is my breakdown of the process:

    • Shoot 12 photos for each second of animation with my DSLR camera (the spy cam is the same)
    • Import the frames into Vegas as a numbered image sequence
    • For each sequence/clip I set the frame rate to 24fps and a field order of None (progressive)
    • Drag the sequence to the timeline
    • For each clip or sequence on the editing timeline I:
      Right Click > Choose Switches > Choose Disable Resample