Stop-Motion Character Animation
For my stop-motion character animation, I decided to depict a desk lamp interacting with a jack o lantern on a counter top, ala Luxo Jr. I did this through taking a series of 241 still image shots using an HD video camera, touching up some of them through Photoshop, and then sequencing them in order on Premiere Pro. In order to get the glowing eye effect on the jack o lantern (as the glow in the dark paint on the pumpkin itself just wasn't visible enough), I had to take the last 58 frames into Photoshop and apply a single paint layer with an outer glow effect, then copy and paste the layer into every single frame, adjusting slightly so it's position stays relatively consistent in each frame. Once in Premiere I changed the duration of the ordered frames to all run at .02 seconds each, so technically this is running on 2's, which was what I had in mind when I was shooting. The trickiest part was the shooting, in particular having to have the lamp positioned in ways that conveyed it transferring energy into it's spine to give off readable believable movement, without letting it lose balance and tip over (this happened quite a few times). At some points I had to use a kneaded eraser just to try and hold it in place slightly while I "push" the lamp's poses as far as it would allow me to. The end result is a (hopefully) charming sequence of a curious lamp that is ironically startled by the seasonal jack o lantern.
For my stop-motion character animation, I decided to depict a desk lamp interacting with a jack o lantern on a counter top, ala Luxo Jr. I did this through taking a series of 241 still image shots using an HD video camera, touching up some of them through Photoshop, and then sequencing them in order on Premiere Pro. In order to get the glowing eye effect on the jack o lantern (as the glow in the dark paint on the pumpkin itself just wasn't visible enough), I had to take the last 58 frames into Photoshop and apply a single paint layer with an outer glow effect, then copy and paste the layer into every single frame, adjusting slightly so it's position stays relatively consistent in each frame. Once in Premiere I changed the duration of the ordered frames to all run at .02 seconds each, so technically this is running on 2's, which was what I had in mind when I was shooting. The trickiest part was the shooting, in particular having to have the lamp positioned in ways that conveyed it transferring energy into it's spine to give off readable believable movement, without letting it lose balance and tip over (this happened quite a few times). At some points I had to use a kneaded eraser just to try and hold it in place slightly while I "push" the lamp's poses as far as it would allow me to. The end result is a (hopefully) charming sequence of a curious lamp that is ironically startled by the seasonal jack o lantern.
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