Video Tweaks and Things

I was going to post a video or two of some tweaked animation but I can not get Premiere to behave, so we shall have to make do with the clip from my last blog and a couple of stills instead.
What we have in the aforementioned clip is a very rough edit together of two shots where the creatures burst through the poster and jump out. To film the track-in, assisted by Georg, I had to rig up the camera on a dismantled rostrum, allowing me to move it backwards and forwards in small increments. On this set-up the camera could be treated as any other animated object would be. Originally I animated the track on twos but this looked awful so I did it on ones instead and it came out a lot smoother. I did manage to mess up the focus pull though so everything goes a bit out of focus half-way through but I quite like it and if I cut out the bit at the beginning where the poster is in focus it would look intentional.
During the course of animating I improvised the scene with the smaller creature pushing the fluff onto the larger one; the characters where starting to develop their own personalities as I worked so i just went with it,I think is works quite nicely. There are some bits which might benefit from an extra frame hold here and there, just to make it all a bit less rushed, which is easy enough to do. There are also a few bits and bobs which may want masking out and maybe a frame adding of the bigger creature leaping from the hole as at the moment it jumps a tad too quickly. All in all though, for my first attempt at stop-mo since last term I don't think it is too bad.

Now for the really techy stuff! In the clip in the last post what you are seeing is an image which has been stretched to fit the widescreen format, stop-motion pro seems to feel a need to do this which is a tad annoying, obviously this is not what I want the film to look like. To fix this I am going to have to take the RAW files from the SLR, which stop-motion pro doesn't touch, and crop them down to fit widescreen, This means that I am shooting a lot more stuff than is actually seen, and have to be careful that all the animation will fit and not get cropped out. Although the clip has been stretched I have cropped it down to try and simulate what the finished article will look like.
Originally I wanted to shoot the entire film so that everything was overexposed and glowing. This is still my intention but I am now going to apply this effect in post because it is easier to perform any digital fixes if the colors are not bleeding into each other.
For the time being I have just messed around with cropping, the exposure, contrast and saturation on some stills and I quite like the results but I might also have a play with filters to adjust the color temp, we shall see.