In week 1 class we talked about a brief history of sequential art and animation and some principles of animation. I loved how devices like Thaumatropes, Phenakistoscope, and Zoetrope generate moving images back in the days and create the illusion of characters coming to life. And those principles of animation were really helpful for me to understand how to animate characters and objects in a way that they look less mechanic and more lively based on real-world physical rules and achieve certain effects that can only be seen in animations through exaggeration. The prompt of this week's assignment is to tell a short story in 30 seconds or less with stop motion, which made me think about what kind of story can be told within 30 seconds of time. I instantly thought about jokes, especially really bad jokes that are easy to grasp. I had a whole database of bad fruits and vegetable jokes in my head I used to walk around and tell people, so I shared this tomato joke with my group, and we all loved it, so we decided to shoot a stop motion with real vegetables as the characters in the joke.
Before shooting, we collected all the materials: color paper for setting street and sky, a variety of vegetables, some plastic eye pieces to stick on the vegetables.
Following the demonstration of how to use Dragon frame and camera in class, we set up all the hardwares(1 Cannon 5D Mark III camera with tripod, 3 lights pointing at different directions), and softwares(1 production laptop with dragon frame).
During shooting, we learned switching between the capture mode and video mode, doing focus check everytime we switch to a new shot. We chose large fine jpg files for our photos, took 2 pictures per frame, and exported the video in H.264 codec at frame rate of 23.97 and aspect ratio of 1620 × 1080. We edited the raw Dragon Frame export file in Premiere to adjust the duration of each shot and applied some background music to it. Finally we recorded our own voice for the characters and distorted it using the pitch shifter audio effect in Premiere.
One problem we encountered during shooting was that it was evening so there wasn't any natural light in the room so we had to borrow a lot of lights to project on our scene. We fixed one light on a tripod, and the other two were clipped on the chairs. We noticed that however we positioned the lights there were always some weird shadows being projected onto the sky backdrop, which is not supposed to happen in real life. So we were just holding the lights during shooting, which probably wasn't a good idea for stop motion because the shadows would just be moving around as the hands holding the lights are not stable during the shot. However, it turned out that the shadows just made it seem like there was some breeze and trees were moving along. Given the time constraint, we just settled with it. We were also having some trouble manually adjusting the white balance in the beginning, so the picture color came out a bit warmer than expected.
Our final video:
https://youtu.be/ne7z2TUaghY