Practicing Stop Motion

Last week we had a go at trying stop motion for ourselves.
On Premiere we set up a new file and created it in the D drive. On the the capture selection, instead of capturing film, we clicked on stop motion. In this, the computer allows you to use the camera directly with the computer. We set up our scene with a toy bus and some paper clips, set the camera on the tripod and made sure the camera wasn't going to move.
Each time we clicked grab frame it took a picture, and gave a ghosted effect of the last image as well as what the camera currently sees, thus allowing you to see how much to move the objects. We made the bus smash through a load of paper clips by gradually grabbing new frames and moving the bus and paper clips slightly each time.
Once the capture was done, Premiere gives you the opportunity to make it into a small video clip for use on the Premiere timeline, or you can keep it as a series of pictures.

Stop Motion Animation

This video involved 1500 hours of moving lego bricks into the right positions and taking loads of pictures of them. This video is very entertaining and most of it its hard to believe that it really is lego being moved around as it appears like CGI in some parts and like real time movement in others.

Monty Python Animation

Monty Python Animation

I have just been looking at Monty Python Animation on youtube to get an idea of the type of things I could do with stop motion. I found some of the videos a bit boring as it consisted of only a few movements which were repeated.
Other videos I found quite entertaining, you could see how they were made using lots of pictures edited together in stages to create a stop motion film. I particularly liked one where a man was being pumped up before he exploded and then you see his head falling back down.

I have learnt, from watching these that it would be a very good idea when I take the pictures of my props etc that I take lots of different angles and if its a person or animal or such like that I get pictures of them in different positions.

Photomontage.

Here is another of my photomontage images.

In this one I started off using my image of a bus and its surroundings. The first thing I did was use the clone tool to remove a lamp post and to get rid of the "bus stop" markings on the road. I then used the magic wand tool to cut out the jet and stick it in, using transform to position it and resize it as I needed to. I then used the magnetic lasso tool at a tollerance of 2% to cut out the spitfires, again using transform to position and size as I needed. The next thing I did was used the polyganol lasso tool to cut out the bins, unfortunately these were low resolution images so dont look as good. I was struggling to find any other images that I could use on my memory stick so I cut out the picture of a man using a snow machine and put him on the edge of the road.

Photomontage

My Joiner will go on this post once I have finished editing it again in photoshop as what I took to be a joiner was not right.