BEYOND THE BOUNDARIES: Stop Motion Shoot
Our stop motion shoot took four weeks for about 16-17 shots in total. We used the film cutting rooms, a Cannon DSLR and Dragonframe, a software supported by the university. We also used an Arri fresnel kit, tripods and for some days a motorized slider...
Getting everything shot was tough, as the room was small, especially for two people working for roughly 9-10 hours a day. Thankfully the heat caused by the lights wasn't a big problem for us as because we had done our risk assessment we brought in a fan to ventilate the hot air out of the room, poor clay however occasionally had his "meltdowns"...
The way we planned our dope sheets was using a previsualization in the form of CGI versions of the shots. These previs shots helped us figure out the timings and gave us a very detailed guide for creating our shots:
Getting everything shot was tough, as the room was small, especially for two people working for roughly 9-10 hours a day. Thankfully the heat caused by the lights wasn't a big problem for us as because we had done our risk assessment we brought in a fan to ventilate the hot air out of the room, poor clay however occasionally had his "meltdowns"...
The way we planned our dope sheets was using a previsualization in the form of CGI versions of the shots. These previs shots helped us figure out the timings and gave us a very detailed guide for creating our shots:
As we were filming we had the audio clip and notes written on the dope sheet based off of the above previs. This let us shoot an an incredibly quick pace, getting about 300 frames done every day.
This is a typical shot we would get (this actually took up an entire day):
As this was shot using stills we would end up with allot of data, with a resolution of roughly 8K, which would be plenty for our HD delivery.
Although the main set appeared throughout most of the shots, we also built a second set for one of the shots. As this set was put together quickly with no cost, the result was a bit of movement during the shot. Therefore as we had the slider and it could repeat the same movement again we decided to shoot a second plate to restore the background.
We also had two days in the bigger studio to shoot some live action elements that would intercut with out two characters. However we did not waste the day as simultaneously we were also shooting one of the shots.
This shot was one of the trickiest as it required a non-linear camera move. Although the slider was motorized, there wasn't any way of connecting it to Dragonframe's interface, therefore a move could not be programmed automatically.
However we still had the previsualizations that we did to get the dope sheets, and as these had the camera information in them for each frame i was able to write down a speed value. Then when it came time to shoot it we just input the value on the slider's contoller. This enabled us to get a smooth dolly out motion to reveal that Clay doesn't have his arm.
Overall shooting the stop motion was a tiring, yet very educational and fun experience. Pre-planning everything was definitely the reason we managed to pull it off in such a short amount of time, and i believe it's definitely worth it as the results speak for themselves.
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