I was not very happy with the way that octopus video turned out. It is kind of fuzzy. It is jumpy (that part is my fault, I was not patient enough to get the right frames and tried to duplicate, which I know rarely works well in stop mo). So I started looking online for Pinnacle studio tutorials. With the newer version, you can shoot stop mo directly to computer, and it has fewer requirements than Dragonframe. They are having a sale, so instead of $120 to upgrade, it is only $69.95. I have been struggling long and hard, and right now, the point of everything I am doing is to figure out the best way to use the equipment I've got. I can still use version 18 if 20 does not work with my laptop. So I decided to go for it. I may regret it, but it isn't as bad as the $300 oopsy with Dragonframe. Which according to thier tech specs SHOULD work with this laptop and does NOT. Won't even open. BTW, thier support is CRAP. I do not reccomend Dragonframe, even if it turns out to work great after I have the money to upgrade my laptop.

Pinnacle upgrade is downloading right now. I guestimate I will know if I have chosen wisely or chosen poorly in about 30 minutes. Fortunately for me, all I will be out is $70 and my frustration. No melty faces or whatever. My plan is to do a little playing around tonight, and if I can get it to recognize my camera, shoot and whatnot, I will do some actual shooting tomorrow and Periscope it. See if I can get a better video. If not, I will be disappointed.

The other thing I have been thinking over is the 72 hour Horror Film challenge by Eugene Film Society. This year it is going on Oct. 22-24. I mean, it was a frustrating blast last year. And if I can get this to shoot better, I may be able to get a better video than last year. But do I want to deal with it? I have other things I want to work on. BUT.....it would also be a great way to test the new setup, see what I can do with it. I have committed to a DnD game on the Saturday. With how much time was wasted last year with the computer shutting down and losing 3 hours of work, I may be able to do it. I have to decide.....I already committed to the game, and they are counting on me, so if I do it I would have to budget 5 hours out of that to go do that. THough that is tentative, and we have no final go ahead on the game. I suppose I can put my hat in the ring, then decide to drop out if I want.

Argh. Why can't I just be normal and not obsessed with this stop motion crap? I mean I love it. I LOVE IT. I dream about it. I literally cry when something goes wrong, I want to do it well so badly. When it goes right, it goes so right. I wish I had more of a natural aptitude for this, and it wasn't so hard for me to get a good finished product. Sigh.

So in a fit of complete insanity, last weekend I decided to enter a 72 hour horror film challenge put on by the Eugene Film Society. In stop mo. In 72 hours. I really should have my head examined. It was hard, easy, fun, frustrating, impossible, and one of the best things I have done. The resulting film is ok, considering what it is. I see all the flaws that could have been fixed if I had more time and fewer hiccups. But anyway, I decided to write about my experience here, to get it out there, to maybe perform some post mortems, and to help me decide where to go next.

The competition was announced several weeks beforehand, but I did not make the decision to do it until a week before. Considering we were not supposed to do anything for it beforehand, I guess that was best. I tend to overthink things. I opted to sign up for the screenwriting workshop that happened the Saturday before. It really didn't help much as far as writing tips, but it did get me into thinking about what makes a good horror film, and what elements would be feasable in stop mo in such a short amount of time. I knew I was not going to have any time for fixing or adding in post, so I needed to decide what would work easiest on camera as shooting happens. I wrote out 3 loose premises that I could base my movie on, and thought about which elements would be needed for each. I did do some set building beforehand, cause that was not specified in the rules. And well technically I built my puppet beforehand too, as I used Wade.

I also figured out I needed to do some surgery on Wade. He had several joints that were broken that needed to be reglued. Here is Wade waiting for surgery. I had to reglue his arm into the shoulder joint. He is made with square tubing in the torso, with matching but slightly smaller square tubing glued to the arm at the shoulder so that it is removeable. The glue in his shoulder totally broke so his arm wouldn't stay in place. turns out I should have also fixed his leg joints, but that happened later.

That is pretty much all I did beforehand. Thursday night October 22 was the kick off party. I am not good at parties, and had no one to go with me, so I was kind of dreading this part. But they made it manditory in order to get the required line of dialog and the required prop and the rest of the guidelines. I had no need for actors, most people there were there for thier own moves, and no one waanted to do voiceovers. Every actor who attended was looknig for on screen time. And when I requested help with Foley, no one knew what I was talking about. Now actors I can kind of understand, even though some of them claimed to be film students, because that is not an actor's job. But the filmmakers....most of them didn't know what I was talking about either. Foley....one of the most important pieces of any film, especially horror, and no one knew what I was talking about. In case you don't know, Foley is the souunds that are added in post to make it sound realistic. Foot steps, snow crunching, fabric swooshing....all that is Foley. In live action it is generally added because the mics usually only pick up the actor's voices, and in order for it to sound real it needs to be added afterwards. It is also used to add emphasis. If all of a sudden you hear water dripping really loudly, generally that is your Foley artist's work. It is good in live action, but essential in stop motion where there is no ambient sound recorded as you film. I did not find anyone to help me with Foley. I did however find someone to record a voiceover for me. He also did on camera work. Cause not being an idiot he knew he could do both. :)


I really wish they hadn't made that party mandatory. It was very pointless for me to be there. It was at Level Up Arcade, which is a traditional quarter sink arcade with a bar. It was too small for the volume of people...we could hardly move or hear each other over the din of other people talking and video games being played and music playing. I found a couch in the corner, and chatted with anyone else who wandered over there. I read my Facebook. I sang along loudly with Creep when it came on. When it finally came time for the "reveal", people who were customers of the arcade and not with the party continued to play video games, and the crowd was so large I ended up at the back. I heard NOTHING that went on. We stood there for a good 20 minutes listening to the incoherant wah-wah of the peeople talking at the front before they finally just gave us the thumbs drives that had everything they were saying in a documment and was the required recepticle for submission. Needless to say I was glad to get out of there and start working. I was more than slightly annoyed though that they wasted so much of my time.

After that I went back to my tree problem. I still couldn't get the foam to stick to the tree armatures. I decided to stop wasting time, and run down to Eugene Toy and Hobby. They have a huge model train section, with experts. Surely someone there could help me. I ran to the bus stop, where I learned I had missed the bus by 5 minutes, so I ran-walked the 1.5 miles there. By the time I got there I waas red faced, sweaty, and not all that coherant. I am sure they all thought I was crazy. Fortunately this is not the first time I have had a wierd request for them, so they took it with grace. The guy behind the train counter handed me some ultra strong super glue, explained how to use it, all the time looking at me like I was a moron for not being able to do this on my own. I am sure that as soon as I was out the door they were laughing at me. Ah well...that is what this is all about right? Entertainment?

I got to the bus station to find the next one was not for another 30 minutes. Don't let anyone tell you differently...Eugene bus system sucks. On Saturday the ones to my house generally run once an hour. So I ended up grabbing a juice and doughnut from the Kiva and run-walking back home. At least it wasn't a wasted trip.

Once I finally got everything set up, I started shooting. I have a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad which allows me to remote trigger. What you can't see in this picture is that the screenof my iPad is cracked, which s why I haven't done much shooting lately. One of the cracks is right down the side, right where the frame puts presure on it. I worried I would totally kill my iPad using it. However at thhe moment I don't have an alternative camera, so it would have to do. I managed to not break it completely, so I am hoping by not having the iPad resting directly on the frame it helped.

In the middle of shooting I ran into more Wade issues. This guy would not stay together. His legs kept falling off. The glue had brokenn from his pelvis, so the legs kept falling out of the square tubes. I tried moving the ruler up a bit, but that didn't help. I finally took the legs off, which actually made it easier for him to stay attached to the cliff edge.

But I got them all pulled over, and spent hours pulling them into Pinnacle, setting the frame length for each pic, trying to watch it and adjust accordingly. However, Pinnacle and my PC did not want to cooperate. My computer overheated several times. I ended up having to compile each segment sepaerately then add them together. The frame rate I set was 24 FPS, but it would only let me export it in 29.9, which made it loook way different. I spent many frustrated hours trying to fix it. Then at one point it would not let me add pictures into my timeline. Turned out Microsoftt had decided to run updates, even though I completely turned off updating while I was working. I could not get that setting to stay off. I finally had to do some rebooting.

But after all that, I finally got it done. I finished at 6pm, which didn't leave me much time to get it in. The bus wouldn't get me there on time, so I tried getting a cab. I called 4 cab companies....all of them were at least 45 minutes out. I finally texted my frined who drove me over there. I got it in by 6:30, well within the time alloted. Whew. That was long, hard, and completely insane. 

If you want to watch it, you can see it here: GARGOUILLE.

Another month has gone by. I suppose it is time to update this.

I have been working on audio, but I have a limited amount of time I can work on it, and I don't yet have anything I am willing to post. I will probably work some more on it tonight.

One of my favorite geek bands, Debs & Errol, were in the running for the CBC Searchlight. Errol wanted to do something with the #Votegeek hashtag, and called for fans to send him pictures of themselves with it. So I dusted off Wade and ran around town taking pictures. I also decided to take this as an excuse to actually build him a set. He needed furniture, big time. Everything I have is simply Liliputian compared to him. Here is one of the pics I took at Dutch Brothers. They are so awesome there.

Anyway...

So, anyway, I took a few days a built Wade a sofa and an end table and a coffee table. I sewed a cushion and crocheted a blanket to go on the back of the sofa. I painted a background. So now that I had all these things, of course I had to play around with them. The resulting videos are not great, but the set looks awesome. Needs more detail, like pictures, a window, a book shelf, etc.  Otherwise I am happy with it. Here is the mess I call a video...

So, there ya go. This month hasn't been completely uneventful. As I play with Wade and what he can do I hope to have more test videos to post.

So time has marched forward, and so has my progress....a little anyway. I now have my storyline for the steampunk video all lined out. I have my characters developed. I have designed the world in which they will live. I am kind of excited about it. This is going to be fun, once I get past the hard parts.

I decided I want the exterior of the houses to all be stone, with stone garden walls, etc. I envision this place to be like one the planned garden cities in England of the late 19th and early 20th century. If I am going to do this I need to find a good way to replicate a lot of walls. I do not sculpt well. I am not going to rely on someone with sculpting skills to have time available for this. So I took a trip to the Eugene Toy & Hobby to see waht they had. I found these retaining wall sections for model train sets. They will work wonderfully. I just can't afford to buy all I need. They were $11 for a set of 3.  I have liquid latex. I have lots and lots of cheap plaster. I thought hey, why not make my own molds of these wall sections and then I can make all I need cheaply.

Latex mold making is not as easy as they make it look. they didn't turn out very well. I got sick from all the latex fumes. And the ones that did work didn't actually produce a working model. Even though the molds really did not shrink (I can fit the original in without stretching it), the casting is a good inch smaller than the original. I need to figure out why. I also had a hard time getting that first layer to dry properly. The side touching the original wall piece never dried properly no matter how long I left it before I did the second layer. The thing is, when you do a second layer, you can't wait too long or the layers don't adhere to each other properly. Then there were the issues with making the mother molds. Latex is thin and does not hold it's shape. This is ideal for peeling it off the original...not so for holding the casting material in the right shape. So you make a mother mold out of plaster. After the last layer has dried you cover it in plaster. Let it sit until set and voila you have a good solid base for the latex mold that will still allow for you to peel the latex off the casting without breaking it. my issue...the plaster kept crumbling. I followed the directions on how to mix it. I let it sit for hours. the ambient room temp was 70. The stupid things just kept crumbling. I finally got a few that will work, though I really need to figure out how to solve the mysterious shrinking casting issue.

Here be the picture evidence. The yellow one on the left is the first one that worked. the one at the top is the second one, though you can tell it stuck to the original and destroyed some of the detail. The one in the middle is the original, and to the right is the casting. Sad, sad, sad.

I guess I am failing in whole new ways. That is ok. I am learning, and each one gets better. I just don't have a lot of time. I wanted to get the video done in time to submit it to the Pacific Northwest Animation festival as well, but that is not going to happen. The deadline for that is Dec 31. It is already the 11th. I will be lucky if I can get the sets built by then.
    I also had a brilliant idea to use those poseable wooden artists manquins as the armatures for the puppets. I figured out how to get the hands to work, I just got to figure out how to build up the head and face. The advantage is there are more natural articulation points, and they are already built up to natural human proportions. I will still work on learning how to make my own, but to try to facilitate this video that is what I am trying.

Because I don't have a lot of good clamping tools for delicate cutting, I used a Dremmel with the sanding wheel to grind the hands down to where they are more normal shape. The dots are the places I will be gluing twisted florist wire. I will then wrap them all in paper sports tape and paint them. Then I need to decide how I am going to anchor them. Do I want to continue the magnet method, or do I want to drill holes and destroy my set table to try screw anchors? I am leaning toward the magnets. Less permanent damage. And I don't have to go buy sturdier foam for the base. I don't think I could get that locally. Disadvantage of living in a small town.

    And that is as far as I have gotten. The molds alone took 3 days. This is a long slow process. I am impatient. I want to be animating. However, this time I want better puppets and sets. I want this one to be really cool.

    I am also looking into renting office space. As long as I keep it under $300 and utilities included I may be able to do it. I would be sacrificing saving any money for deposits for my own place to live, but it would be easier for everyone else to help out if I had a place other than just a bedroom for us to work. It feels weird, and frankly no one really wants to do that, as much as they want to work on this. Sigh. It always comes down to money, doesn't it. Well, if I can get to a place where my animations look more professional maybe I can get a few commissions, maybe start at least having it pay for itself. that would make it tons easier.

Anyway, if you are reading this and have an inkling of why my molds are giving me grief, feel free to either comment or email me. I was planning on having people over to help make castings, but I have to have enough molds for more than just one person to use.

It has been such a busy week. I have been working on animating. I plan on sharinf pictures and thoughts on the process, but right now I am SO tired and need desperately to nap. I will post when I have more energy.

I will, however, take the time to share with you my new video. It is not great, but it isn't bad. I ran out of time to do proper audio dialog and sound mixing, so I went with the silent movie approach.

Also reworked my second animation ever. It is pretty bad. There was a lot more to it, but I cut it down for your sanity and mine. It was part of a series of animations I did about the Tardis taking time to have adventures without the Doctor. The sound is a little off, but I will fix it later.

So there ya go. Will talk about animating next post.

It has been 5 days. Yes, that is a long time to take on this project. A lot more than I expected. I thought the majority of my problems with this software were because I was unfamiliar with it. After working and working to try get get what I wanted out of the software I finally gave up.

My first move was to get the manual. I figured any questions I might have would be answered by it. I was wrong. Things it didn't explain that would have been helpful:

-How to join clips
-How to put sound to more than one clip, when you are using multiple clips in your movie (which they suggest you do) and you have one long sound clip
-How to remove audio that you have uploaded. Not from the clips, but from the import queue.
-How to resize your stills

I had several issues while working with this. Again, I am probably trying to do more than it was meant for, but still it was frustrating. As I do not currently have the ability to capture pictures directly into the computer, importing stills was all I could do. As I used my iPad to take the stills, I had no options as to the size or dimensions of the stills. Because they were so large it took a long time to import. I expected this. It would be a lot to ask of any program to make that large of a data import go quickly.

I chose to set the movie frame rate at 24 fps. It is easier to calculate movement with an even number of frames per second. That is something I am still struggling with. When you see the video you will see stilted movement and fluttriness. That is due more to my learning curve for calculating movement than it is the software. Still, 24 fps seemed to work out ok.

Because I plan to break my videos up into scenes, I made more than one clip to test the software's continuity abilities. The first clip is from the TMBG Istanbul video I have been playing with, the second is just a little thing I shot to play around with. I recorded myself playing a simple chord progression on the ukelele for my sound. I am glad, because if I had chosen dialog getting the sound to match would have been way more difficult than it already was.

The first issue I encountered was getting the clips to join up. It isn't clear how to do that. My idea was to take my two clips, put them back to back then add the sound. That didn't work. There is no way to do that. So then I tried to add the sound to the first clip, but then it made the first clip twice as long with a long pause of background, then it ran the second clip. That is where I ran into the next problem. There is no time ticker anywhere. I had no idea how long each clip was exactly. My next idea was to cut the sound into the right length for the clips. Makes sense. Didn't work. I tried exporting each clip separately to figure out how long I needed to make each audio clip. It was off by 4 seconds. When I cut the audio and imported it into AI, each clip was too short. At that point I ran out of patience and just moved the audio so there was a few seconds of silence at the beginning and a few at the end. Having instructions on how to do this would have helped a lot. Having a counter so I knew exactly how long my clips were and how much audio I needed to fill the space would have helped a lot.

I have a bunch more I can say about it, but I think I am going to end it here. I was disappointed. I expected more from Aardman. At the very least I expected to be able to find answers to my questions and not spend 5 days with frustrating trial and error.  I also already stated some things in my last post, and as I did not find answers I will just leave it alone. I am glad it was a free trial and I didn't waste money on it.

So here is my final video:

So I did a little playing, and found some interesting things. No, I wouldn't recommend always using iPad apps for stop motion. Seems stupid if you have the money for the real deal compiler software and real equipment. I don't. I have had problems getting After Effects to work, Windows Movie Maker goes in and out of utility, and pretty much everything else out there requires you to be able to capture directly to computer and my point n shoot doesn't allow that.

So now that I have the iPad that was first prize for the Literary Platform Douglas Adams Animation contest, I thought I would research the feasibility of using the iPad. I do not have a Mac computer, so that has been my first hurdle to jump. Apparently they do not play well together. After several tried I finally got the pictures I took with the iPad onto my Windows machine. If I can ever get the software to work for me, that might be doable. At first I was having problems with the camera. Remember, this was made to be idiot proof, which means very little control. I learned a few things about how to get it to work right.

1. Use a LOT of light. The controls are really shitty, so if you want a clear picture you need lots and lots of light. Even if you think you have enough light, add more. The camera seems to work better with excess light than with not enough. Grainy pictures that aren't as crisp as you want them will be the result if you don't.

2. Even when using Focus Lock, double check to make sure focus hasn't changed. If you tap and hold your finger in a particular spot, it will lock focus on that spot and it is supposed to keep focus on the spot until you move it. Well, in the we-know-better-than-you vein, it doesn't always stay in focus lock. From time to time it does the face scan thing, which removes focus lock if the focus isn't focused on what it thinks is a face. This annoys me. I have not found a way to turn the face recognition off yet. That may come, but for now there doesn't seem a way around it, so you have to constantly check to make sure your focus lock is where you want it to be.

3. Keep fingers away from the lens. I know this seems a simple and obvious thing, but when you are dealing with smalls sets as I am and have to keep the camera close in, sometimes I can't help but get my hands or fingers too close to the lens, which breaks the focus lock and readjusts it to the closest thing - me. That shouldn't happen with focus lock, but it is happening just about every picture.

Ok, so now I have figured out how to get the camera to sort of work. Lets talk about the apps I tried out. Most of the animation apps were not for stop motion. They were for drawn animation. I found 3 apps that actually fit the criteria and also didn't require me to buy the full version for a Mac in order to use it. I tried out iMotion HD, StopAnimator and StoMo. I have no idea who created these apps. I am not promoting any of them particularly. I am just comparing them. Remember as I go through these that I am looking to do good quality videos. All three of these would be good if you are a kid and only want to play with stop motion. Someone who is an expert in stop motion and is very skilled at the craft may be able to do a better job than I did. But for what it is worth, here is how it all shook out.

iMotion - This one isn't too bad. It does have an onion skin option, which I like. You can also do time lapse with this app. I haven't tried it yet. Seems interesting. Doesn't do stop mo though, so I will leave that for later. First thing I noticed is you have absolutely no control over the camera. You can't set focus lock, you can't zoom in, you can't do anything. This is fine if you are working in a big set, I guess, but in these small sets it is a pain in the ass. The focus is so not consistent it makes me want to scream. Also, when exporting the video you do not get to choose the frame rate of the exported video. You can choose it in the app, but it ignores your choice when exporting.

Here's the short sample video I did:

Besides being fluttery, which seems to be my issue not the app's, it is way faster than it should be. If you slow it down to the speed it was supposed to be, you can see the focus changing. Annoying!

StopAnimator- This one also doesn't allow for any type of camera control. It also doesn't have any onion skin capability. You don't have any type of frame rate control either. The one good thing about this app is if you set some things in the camera mode, it will hold on to them - though focus lock is not one of them. But if you zoom in via camera then switch apps you can be zoomed in for this app. When watching this one, notice that even though I did not move the camera in any way nor did I set a zoom or unset a zoom, the views are very very different.

Here's this one:

This one at least stayed at a good frame rate. You can see the focus changing. It is infinitely annoying.

StoMo - This has the most controls inside the app of all of them. It keeps track of the number of frames you have taken, it allows you to shoot more than one scene and label them. It also gives you control over how dark the previous image is when using onion skinning and lets you control the fram rate. You can play it back at several frame rates to see which one works best. It is also the only one that allows you to edit individual frames. The biggest problems with this app is again you have no control over the camera and the image you get isn't exactly the image you see in the preview. It isn't always as focused as the actual picture is, so you have no idea what exactly the end result will be. It also has some lag and responsiveness issues.

Notice how much further away it looks than the other videos. I did not move the camera, play with the zoom, nor did I have any type of control over that. The frames in the app look closer to what you see in the other video than to what you see in this video. It also continuously refocuses, and as you can't really tell under the onion skinning and blurriness, I couldn't fix it. That frustrates me as well.

So, I suppose in conclusion I don't really think any of these will work for what I do. There may be more that I have missed. The search feature isn't exactly precise in the app store. There may be ways to work around these flaws. And one day I may have the patience to figure them out. For now, though, it doesn't work. I have limited energy at the moment, so I need to find one thing that I like and really concentrate on learning it. Once I settle onto what "it" is.

Oh...and none of the apps allow you to add audio. You have to find a separate application to do that. That is annoying as hell as well.