Taking the new stop motion photos

Thanks to Hannah's test we were able to estimate roughly how long this new stop motion would take and decided we could get it all done in time for the new draft deadline monday the 22nd. As the editing takes an incredible amount of time we all stuck together on getting the photos taken before the weekend. But we made sure when taking them that all factors from lighting to position to the slight movements were indefinitely correct and as close to perfection as we could achieve.

But as my participation in filming was a lot less compared to Hannah's and Alex's I was given the direction of this new stop motion.

We first started by discussing the location shots taken on saturday for these new narrative situations and went through how each new narrative would appear in the surroundings. This helped me understand the scale for the first bit of stop motion which was of the male character walking to the side of the screen. We set up the white background with 5 pieces of A3 paper, aligned the camera and stuck it firm to the table.

To help as best I could I decided to draw out the location shots to make sure I got the right distance between the camera and the playmobil character. This would help dramatically when editing because as explained by Hannah and Alex resizing and moving each cut out individually is extremely hard to get right.

The first bit of stop motion was the male character simply walking to the right hand side. The photos were taken quickly and efficiently with no break in the routine of moving the characters, getting the right focus and taking the photo.

Other stop motion took much longer such as the male character ascending a rope which I had to do as slow as possible to make sure the character travelled down the rope in a straight line and didn't appear to lose contact with it.

But other clips such as the female character climbing the stairs were extremely easy because of the simplicity in moving her in the same position up the back ground. In the end Hannah and Alex edited the sequence with ease because it was noted that the same cut out could be reused in each frame without it looking too fake.

We now have all the photos needed for the new situations with additional improvised sequences in case we run out of footage and need to fill a section within the music video. We aim to finish all the editing of the new stop motion by Monday for another draft hand in.