Uber Blog

It’s done, the stop motion is finally done, a week behind schedule but nevertheless done. After the ritual burning of the set I now have to face up to the stark reality that there is rather a lot of stuff to do in post so I’m bracing myself for another manic week but for now: let the good times roll and the explanation of what I’ve been up to this week.

So, apart from slowly going mad, what have I been up to? Well, I will show you, through the wonderful medium of video. Here are most of the test animations that we did before actually filming the shots that we needed, which is the main reason why it actually took so long to finish everything. I will also point out that some of them have very long pauses of nothingness on the end because stop motion pro won’t let you render anything off which is less than two seconds so I just added lots of blank frames to make up the time.

First up: the nodding duck chickens, which I touched on last week. This first test shows a very basic animation (animated by Charlotte and Ralph, I think, it’s been a long week), first on twos and then on ones. This was just to see what looked best and we all agreed that animation done on ones looked much better.

We then experimented with different ways of doing the ‘nod’, in the first bit of this test we tried to ease in and out of the movement and create a sort of pecking look. Ben then asked us if we could animate it so that the head came out when the neck went down and visa versa. I animated the duck on the left, moving the head as the neck went moved and Ralph animated the one on the right; only moving the head at the end of the nod. We decided to use my method but I think that Ralph’s duck had a bit more character to it but I suppose we needed them to look mechanical. The ducks also moved around quite a lot, so we glued them down afterwards. The floor is also animated in this test, we had actually done a test with this earlier but that was on the trail version of stop motion pro and is therefore lost in the depths of cyber land, waiting for Richard to come and rescue it.

With all of that figured out I then set about trying to animate the egg-cup, I tried this first test on both ones and twos, I couldn’t find the one I did on twos but we chose to animate it on ones anyway. In this test it is propped up on plaster-scene which looked ok, and gave a nice looking rotation effect to the whole thing but it wasn’t particularly sturdy so we put a bolt through it.

In this test, said bolt is in place and affixed to the set, we were going to glue it but we seem to have been using the most lame glue known to man and just held it and everything else in place with plaster-scene; the greatest invention ever. This test was nice and pretty and most importantly, sturdy.

Almost everything was set then loomed the dreaded egg, the bain of my life; which I spent three days trying to animate. I have only included the final test as the other two tests are just pitiful and the other countless attempts to lower it that are just to painful to recall. They involved me gluing the egg to a piece of dowel and lowering it frame by frame, via G clamp and a hole in the ceiling, into the eggcup. It all looked very jumpy and it was near impossible to lower it in a strait line. So Ben came up with the nifty idea of putting the dowel through the egg – genius. With the aid of strategically placed holes and a pin I could lower the egg like a dream.

And so we arrive at the finished product, and isn’t it just lovely, Ben stood in for Ralph and animated the duck on the right, Holley moved the floor, Charlotte yelled numbers at us and pushed a big button and I just hogged as much animation as possible and animated the duck on the left, the eggcup and the egg. The egg does come down a bit quickly but apart from that I think its ok.

Ralph and I have also shot a scene of the floor spinning to a stop and the candelabra things but due to time constraints we did no tests, which I know is very bad and wrong, as of yet there are no videos of these scenes as the people in post are working off of stills and I forgot to make a separate video for my blog but hopefully I can find time to do that tomorrow as well as talk about the lighting.