Editing

These are stills from my editing of my stop motion footage.

One of the things I had to do during the edit was add more saturation to the footage as the camera had for some reason barely taken in any colour at all, I am unaware if this was my fault or is just the way the camera films but it was easily fixed with the Quick Colour Tool

The rest of the edit was simple enough, just putting footage together and adjusting any brightness issues, then adding the sounds and music in the right place.

Sounds & Music

For my stop-motion shorts I have decided to add sound effects and music. All sound recording will be done in co-operation with Dan Bolton. I will be adding voice lines also as I feel this will give clarity to the very loose story that I have created. Without the voice lines it will be very confusing as to what is going on because the limited movement possibilities, however it is not possible to have mouth movements without editing in a moving mouth. I believe that the stop-motion will be better without these mouths however as they will be distracting.

My Tests

This is the video of the test footage I took when practicing techniques and movements with the lego characters. The tests were mainly arm movements and walking to see how easy it was to achieve the effect and see which time lapse setting to set the camera to when moving the characters around. I found that sometimes it was often beneficial to let the camera take two frames before moving the character to ensure the movement looked fluid rather than jumpy.
I also did a test in this of using a cloth dinosaur in the shot, as this is not lego it is harder to create the movement as when released the dinosaur would move back to its original position rather than holding it, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to include this in the final piece.

Editing

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To edit this footage I have chosen to use Premiere rather than Avid as I am not an experienced editor and find this software easier to use. All I need it for is to sew the footage together and maybe add some basic effects and transitions.

Learning the Basics

This video and many other Youtube tutorials all gave very helpful tips for people starting off in the world of LEGO stop motion. From moving arms to walking to even possibly jumping, there is a lot of things you can do with LEGO.

Camera

For Stop Motion it is normal to use a stills camera, however to change up the technique a bit I am considering using the BMCC as it is a very high-quality camera and using the time lapse function in the camera I can take a frame every certain amount of time, giving me an opportunity to move the figures around before the next frame is taken. This is also for convenience as the footage will already be in video format and I will be able to watch the footage back in video form immediately after taking it rather than having to wait til editing to see the stills stringed together.
Of course this will present a time frame problem as I will have to ensure I have moved everything that needed to be moved within the time I have set myself as to not get caught in shot during the next frame, however this is a risk I am willing to take so I have the ability to watch the footage back as it is intended to be viewed straight away.

Example of Lego Stop Motion

This is a simple yet interesting stop motion animation which includes quite a bit of movement but none too complicated.

Which Material?

When creating stop motion it seems there are a few options in the way of material in which you can create your subjects, characters, and sets. The most famous are of course clay or plasticine as it is very adaptable and can be molded into a very large variety of shapes. Stop- Motion studios will often spend months designing the characters every facial expression and pose into clay as the possibilities are very wide. Despite this I have decided against using clay or plasticine for my own stop motion project as I find it is quite expensive if one wishes to use a large variety of colours and also because I lack experience in sculpting and modeling clay which will mean my stop motion would most likely look like a lot of messy blobs rather than actual characters.

Instead I found a cheaper and more efficient material for myself when browsing youtube for stop motion tutorials.
LEGO has taken off in the amateur stop motion world and there are many videos all over the likes of Youtube of people creating scenes with this brand of toy. It is not only already in shape and does not need to be sculpted or molded but also comes with pre-built characters with facial expressions. Although it could still be considered quite expensive I do already have access to some lego which I could use.
The main flaw with using lego is because it is plastic and pre-molded, the movement you can perform with these figures is more restricted than that of clay. The arms of the figures only move in one direction and a lego figures face cannot move at all.

Stop Motion

"The basic process of animation involves taking a photograph of your objects or characters, moving them slightly, and taking another photograph."
http://www.dragonframe.com/intro_to_stop_motion.php

Stop motion has been around for longer than a century, it consists of a sequence of still put together to create the illusion of a moving image and was often used before CGI was around to create magically moving objects or enormous creatures like the dinosaurs from the 1925 movie The Lost World. Moving into the 70’s though stop motion became more of a style than an effect and full shows and feature length films have been produced through the decades in stop motion. The British classic Wallace and Gromit comes to mind to most when stop motion is mentioned, in fact the production studio responsible for the crackers twosome has produced a whole host of stop-motion features including chicken run. For other Tim Burton may also come to mind as he has greatly increased the popularity of this style with movies such as Nightmare before Christmas.

The process can be very tedious but it mostly involves moving the characters or props a tiny amount at a time, then taking a still, then repeat however it is very interesting to me that this can in fact make a single moving image file from so many still images. Because of this I feel that creating a stop motion piece with small figures will compare nicely to using smallgantics.

Failure

Even though I managed to get the editing techniques as correct and accurate as I could with my skills the effect has more or less failed to establish. I believe this is mainly because the footage I shot did not completely fulfill the criteria it needed to in order to create the full effect. The footage was not at a high enough angle to the subject therefore even after adding the blur correctly it did not look miniature, although I believe it was shot at a good enough distance.

To further explore into Minor Project I have decided to film with actual miniatures in actual stop- motion to compare it to creating miniatures from life sized footage. 

Locations

For this project I will need to consider location carefully as there are very specific needs I need for my footage. It is essential to the effect that I can find places to film from that are higher than the subjects I choose and preferably I quite a distance from the subject. The subject will more preferably have to be a moving object to get the full effect from the time lapse movement such as people, cars or a train. Looking at other examples if the same effect I have seen that main street or junctions are good examples for this if you can film from a high enough building need the location.
So farI have decided to film the train station from a nearby higher part of land ir from the train bridge above the track near the station.

Editing

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To edit the footage that I will film for this project I have looked at two different editing software's that I have access to through university. I first looked for a program that could manipulate colour easily to add the over saturated effect that I needed. I then looked for the software's ability to easily add adjustable blur to footage. I found that although Da Vinci Resolve would be better for colour correcting and colour grading because that is one of its main uses, After Effects would be better for adding layers and manipulating the lense blur that I need, as well as having some basic colour manipulating abilities. I also found After Effects easier to use in general so I have decided to use this software to edit my project footage.

Camera

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For this project I have decided to use the Black Magic Cinema Camera, not only because it is the best quality camera I have access to but also because for this project I would like to use a time lapse function to create the effect mentioned previously of a stop motion style. The BMCC has a built in time lapse function that can be set at a variety of intervals including frame and seconds, this will benefit the project as it means I will not have to remove frames in the edit, making it look a lot smoother.