explorations in audio and moving imagery
…to work on my StopMoShorts.com entry for December. The three items are sword, fear, and cave.
I’m stretching it a bit but hopefully it will work out. I’ll be spending every free hour shooting “Damocles” until the last week in December. The plan is to move quickly and ignore mistakes and imperfections which should make for an interesting exercise. As far as Vitruvius goes, I finished some shots last week and progress continues on the music score. Vitruvius postings will resume in January.
I just got the new Zigview S2 (model B) with video out which is intended to help with video assist. I tried it out tonight with my Serlio puppet and here are some photos, info, and some thoughts about the product so far. There is also a thread at the StopMotionAnimation.com forums with another Zigview user’s results so far. The climaxdigital website has more info and pics.
Here is a video clip comparing the frames captured with the Zigview and the final output from the Nikon. It is an MP4 file using the H.264 codec at a resolution of 640×480 and is just under 2MB in size. If you can play it, you can get a sense of the quality I am seeing with the Zigview.
Here is the packaging. It comes with the video out cable, and several eye-piece adaptors for Canon, Nikon, and some other cameras. Since I got this from the UK I had to get a $20 Kensington Travel Plug Adapter for Worldwide AC Power to plug it into the wall. (The plug adaptor is the larger cylindrical object with the yellow sticker on it and does not come with the unit but I put it in the pic.) The unit is battery operated but it looks like the battery may run down after a few hours. Fortunately it can operate and charge the battery when plugged in.
Here is the unit attached to my Nikon D50. The unit is really lightweight and the buttons are plastic. It feels a bit delicate but hopefully it can withstand a lot of handling over time. The unit just slides/snaps down onto the viewfinder of the Nikon. Really easy to attach and remove and it swivels around which makes it a lot easier to see what’s going on in the frame at various camera angles. The viewfinder on the unit allows me to focus pretty and so far it appears to capture the whole field of view so I can compose and focus without removing the unit. The video out cable from the Zigview is plugged into a USB Video Grabber that I got at Compusa. The video grabber installed fairly easily into my USB hub so I didn’t have to buy and install any cards in the computer.
I am currently using Stop MotionMaker Advance and here is a screen shot of the desktop with the Zigview as video assist. This should be the actual size of the application panels since I cropped but did not re-size anything in Photoshop for this image. You should be able to get a sense of what the Zigview looks like at 640×480 this way. The image has some noise but I can see everything in the viewfinder and there is enough detail for me to check movements from frame to frame. Plus I’m usually standing about 3 to 6 feet away when moving things so at that rage the 640×480 window looks pretty good for video assist.
Here are a couple of shots to demonstrate the coverage of the viewfinder with the actual hi-res photo taken with the Nikon. I re-sized the hi-res photo which is twice the resolution for this comparison. Again, the zigview appears to provide almost total coverage of what the camera is seeing which really helps with composition.
So far I think this may work out well. It is definitely a step up from the web cam that I was using which had really poor resolution. I couldn’t see details in the face or hands of the puppets with the web cam which I am now able to see thanks to the Zigview.
I usually listen to music when animating. For the Vitruvius project I’ve been enjoying a mix of recent releases from bands such as Dungen, His Name is Alive, Simple Minds, Daniel Lanois and Wolf Parade.
Speaking of Wolf Parade, I found the following music video of their song “Modern World” on YouTube. It looks to be stopmo and/or puppet animation. I like it, particularly the animated machine at the end of the clip.
Michael Granberry at Red Hatchet Films is in production on a stopmo music video and the Vines animated video was making the rounds not too long ago.
It would seem to be a good time for stopmotion animators and music videos.
A growing number of stop motion animators are using services like blogger, wordpress, or moveabletype to run their webs sites. As such, the sites are usually accompanied by a web feed (RSS feed) which allows people to subscribe and keep up with new postings without having to surf around the web all day. It makes it possible to assemble a personal newspaper with the latest updates from the things you want to follow.
I usually keep up with stop motion information via web feeds (aka RSS feeds) and Bloglines as opposed to surfing and clicking around on the web. It saves a lot of time and needless clicking around and I can keep up with what’s going on.
In my Bloglines reader I have a handful of sites such as Darkmatters, Ubatuber, Notes from Halfland, Scarlet Letters, AnimateClay, and Red Hatchet Films. Sites such as these offer fairly regular postings with updates occurring either many times a week or at least something each month. I would love to see the sites from Nick, Lio, Stopmotionanimation.com and Stopmoshorts.com offer web feeds. If they have feeds then either they aren’t advertising them or making them easily discoverable or I’m missing something.
Big thanks to Jeffrey and Shelley for sending some very nice gifts. I got a limited edition woodcut print from the “Jenny Greenteeth” project.
I also have a collectible button for the “Halfland” project.
Other animators are also getting into the online store venture with items available from Phil Dale and Mike Brent. There’s probably more out there. I wonder if there is some way to compile a directory of stopmotion shopping somewhere to see all this merchandise at one location.
Tennessee Reid continues to post various animations he finds on the web. Mike Brent also continues to add to his collection of top-notch animation clips with some recent work by Suzie Templeton. Mike has also posted some info and a sample of the importance of music to film/animation. A lot of films are making their way onto places like YouTube which illustrates how the web can help expose people to work they might never see or consider in the first place. Michael, at Red Hatchet Films, has also put some of his work online and is using a service where, apparently, he gets compensated financially if viewers click the ad at the end of the film. He has started a series called Dredd Manor which looks promising. His film, A Winter’s Tale, is also really good. I particularly like the way each scene is viewed through the windows of the house like little vignettes.
Jeffrey’s film, Jenny Greenteeth continues to develop and his site is one of the more consistent production blogs with many behind the scenes photos and information about his film posted fairly regularly. Shelley’s Halfland project is also unfolding with recent work in set design. Sven at Scarlet Letters has posted some excellent information regarding metal armature creation and also posted animation tests worth checking out. Leevi continues to upload scenes from his HarmoniCa project. I notice some missing scene numbers so he is either shooting out of order or holding them offline until the day we may get to see the complete work. In any case it just gets better and better with every clip he releases.
Lastly, my film Man Drawing… has been submitted to a handful of film festivals but no word yet on acceptance. My Vitruvius project continues with June and July activities consisting of building the secondary stage, more puppet costume work, lighting and camera tests, and framegrabbing software tests. I’ve also started running some test animations for compositing tests and choreography of motion.
Prior to 2003 I had been working with Lightwave and 3D computer graphics as my medium for independent film projects. As it turns out those projects never left the pre-production phase because in 2003 I made a wooden ball-and-socket joint to see if it would simulate the function of a metal armature. The results worked well enough for me to develop a full character armature (which is what you in the test video). I had never done stopmotion animation before but found the armature was a pleasure to work with and the results were sufficient. Subsequently, I made the short film “Man Drawing a Reclining Woman” using this method for the two characters in the film.
The wood is basswood, which is stronger than balsa but still very light, and the wooden beads have pre-drilled holes that can hold a section of square basswood or a dowel rod pretty well. For the joints and plates I used the open hole socket method and 4-40 bolts and nuts to sandwich the beads between the plates. Superglue and hot glue were used to hold various non-moving parts together.
