Chewing chewing chewing

Hi all you stop motion fans! I made a new mation this week.

Here are the deets:

-30 fps (WHAT!? Yeah, absolutely no frames are longer than 1/30 of a second. Even the pauses in animation are continuous frames)
-35 seconds of PURE ANIMATION!
-It took me approximately 30 hours to animate
-I had to draw all the shadows when the guys jump by hand, which took me a whole day!

Anyways, I'm REALLY trying to improve on my mationing and coordinating different movements at the same time (hence three characters, with talking) and I think I'm learning!

Here are some behind the scenes photos. The characters are actually pretty small, which made them really difficult to work with, especially changing the replacement eyes for when they blink. Is anyone even reading all this boring text anyways!?

*click on images for HIGHER resolution, yo.

The complete set, just on top of my dresser

Sooooo many replacement mouths! (ain't even all of them, some got too squished)

UPDATE!

Here is the final product:

And here is the unedited version:

AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I finally figured out how to stop the flickering!

After too many hours and too many redo-shots (nearly 20!), I finally figured out the right exposure settings to put flickering to a minimal!

Here is the result of the final redo-shots. Almost no flickering!

Platypus 2 Shot 1 & 2

Well, I learned a lesson with my new camera and Dragon stop motion software today. After I capture a frame on Dragon, the camera then takes its own picture and uploads it to a high-res file; there's about a 3 second delay between the two.

So, after I thought everything was all fine and dandy with the two shots I just made, I exported the high-res image sequence and, well, just look at what happened:

Although, I think that the firefeets turned out pretty swell! Anyways, it's back to reshooting them again!

I've been using a free trial of Dragon Stop Motion software (http://www.dragonstopmotion.com/), and have found it to be pretty good. Here's my review:

Pros:

-you can onionskin your live feed with frames you just shot

-you can easily playback the frames you just shot including your live feed

-you can easily delete frames

-you can draw on your screen to help with markers and measurements

-all the functions have hotkeys on your numbpad

Cons:

-you cannot link (at least I haven't discovered how yet) different takes together to see how it flows. You need to do this in an external program, like AfterEffects

-it always takes a few seconds of waiting after you capture a shot for the program to catch up (could just be my computer??)

-the program creates about 5 folders for each frame you take: 2 low res file folders, each with a slightly higher res folder inside and finally a very high res folder. IT'S VERY CONFUSING!

Also, if you download the free trial, it only lets you take 50 frames at a time, so be careful!

UPDATE:

Here are the two shots redone:

Platypus 1 Shot 2

After I made my last post, I went right back to animating, and here's the second shot. It's 75 frames and it took me 1 hour and 1 minute (I timed myself)!

I will cut out the little hair swoosh at the end. That is all.

Platypus 1 Shot 1

Here's my first shot. After about 3 attempts, I am most happy with the result of this one, even though it's a bit jerky when he picks up the tea. It took me about 2 hours to do all 160 frames (that's nearly 3 frames a minute!). Also, there's no way I could reduce the flickering, I believe it's just the variation in voltage to my lamp :(

Steaming, it's about 24fps; I originally shot it to be 30fps, but he was moving too fast. I'm also going to cut it right before he stops pouring the tea.

NEW MATION

Long time, no mations! Well, I just got a SWEET camera (check it out!) courtesy of my fine older brother (check him out!) and I have been dying to put into into use!

As I was thinking of an idea, I was also throwing out my old school notebooks and stumbled upon a page from my third year Human Resources class that had a little animation story on it (don't pay any attention to the notes, haha).

Here's the plot: Platypus 1 (P1) is the reception guy at some store. He makes some tea and drinks it too. Platypus 2 (P2) comes sliding in from the right. Sparks fly from his feet. P 2 stops and asks P 1 "Do you sell boots?" P 1 says "We have no boots left!" P 1 then overturns the reception table and reveals that he was secretly wearing a pair of boots. P 2's eyes turn into lazers and he melts P 1. As P 2 stands there satisfied, the boots float to the top of P 1's meltedness.

Here is a picture of all the replacement parts and stuff that I made yesterday

(click on the images to make them GIGANTIC, thanks to my amazing camera from my amazing brother)

Here are some tests of the firefeet and lazereyes

And here are the two Platypi in all their glory

P1: P2:

The Fish King is done!

And the Fish King is complete!

Hope you enjoy it!

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the result. I was a little worried about the differences in camera position between scenes, but I just faded them overtop of eachother, and non are the wiser!

Also, here's a shot of my workspace for this animation.

The Fish King Final Scene

Here is the final scene from the Fish King. It took me about five hours to animate, I think I now need chiropractic treatment from being slouched over the entire time.

Here are some comments on the scene:

• I accidentally bumped the camera from the previous scene. I did my best to put it back in its original position, so there will be a slight difference in camera position between the last two scenes.
• The first half with the squid walking and the king talking is some of the smoothest animation I've ever done! Woot!
• The squid jumping away is WAY too quick! I got too caught up in the king's lip syn and forgot to start the squid jumping sooner. I had to make the jump really quick so that the King's sync still matched his "W-o-a-h!" when he falls. However, I did animate a lot of in-between frames just in case, so I'll see if I can put those back in somehow.
• Originally, I was going to have water splash out of the cart when the King falls out (he is a fish), but by the time it came around to animating that part, it was already past midnight and I just wanted to go to bed.
• I still have a lot of touching up to do on the frames and I have to fix some of the lip sync.

The Fish King is Getting Annoyed

3rd scene comments: - for some reason I can't seem to animate the squid's arms quite right anymore - not going to worry about the speed differences of the cart - two and a half hours for 4 seconds. Phew!

The FISH King Take 2

And here's the second scene! It took nearly 5 hours to animate and really made me wish I had a camera and software that were MADE for STOPMOTION!

In order to see if I was on the right track with the movements, I would have to take some frames, name them individually and save them to a folder, then import them into my video editing software, align them together and then play them back. I pretty much did this for almost every frame!

Anyways, so I'm pretty happy with the result, I will still touch up some of the frames in photoshop where I've noticed some errors.

Also, I've added the Fish King's voice (I went back to my original sketches and turns out that he's not the Sea King, I guess that will be for another animation). I first recorded the voice that I wanted and then figured out which frames should have which mouth movements in them. I used to animate the lip sync first and then record the voices later, to which I would shorten/lengthen frames to fit, but this doesn't work anymore since I've been animating at 30fps.

The Sea King Comes to Shore

I animated the first scene today! Basically, the Sea King is pulled in from the right, he wakes up, yawns and then notices the audience. It took approximately 1.5 hours to animate and although I'm not entirely happy with the smoothness of the rolling cart, I'm going to keep it. I could keep animating this over and over, but I will always notice something that I don't like, so it's a keeper.

Also, here's a pic of the replacement mouths and eyes that I will be using for His Majesty.

The Sea King

Here are some clips from my latest claymation project. It will basically be about the Sea King (a whale) who is carted around on land by a not-so-faithful squid.

The first clip is basically a bunch of tests to get a feel for how the squid will walk. I really wanted to animate his six different legs in some sort of crazy walk-cycle, but I couldn't really get a feel for anything. Finally I just went with the basic drag-and-crawl (clip 2) and it seemed to work out fine.

Terrymation to Start Blogging

Toronto, ON – Stop motion animator Terry Ibele, also known as Mozen and Terrymation decided to start blogging on November 22^nd, 2010. His decision was a result of enjoying many other blogger’s blogs on stop motion animation and also because he’s been thinking about starting one for a really long time.

“I want to start posting progress of my work,” said Ibele in a recent interview of himself.

Ibele will hopefully continue to blog for a while and post pictures and test videos of his upcoming projects.