Claymation: Fix ups.

After I made the scene and the clay characters I had to bring them all into uni as they have all the animation equipment such as lights, camera and StopMotion on the computers that I need.

Lab was booked out to me and thankfully no one came in and bothered me as the other lab was available.

I arrived after being dropped off at uni on Saturday at around 9:00am and I finished at 7:30pm, yeah, big day. But that’s the life of an animator.

I had many technical difficulties, which is one of the reasons why it took me so long to animate. When animating in StopMotion you plug the camera directly into the computer and use the computer as the camera. It is really handy as you can change the way the image looks as well as many other things by working this way. But for some reason StopMotion was having difficulties and was taking forever to process an image and wouldn’t allow me to take another image until it was finished. After a long time I called my lecturer, Kelvin, (yes on a Saturday) and we figured out that the image size on the camera and the image size on the computer where completely different. That’s why it was taking so long to process.  I fixed this problem by simply changing the cameras image size to the same size as the computer, 1920 by 1080.

This brought out another problem as every time I fixed the settings in the camera as soon as I hocked it up to StopMotion the camera settings would flick back to the original image size which was massive, I can’t remember how big but somewhere along the lines of 5000. Crazy, and no matter what I did the problem would not go away.

In the end I ended up doing it the old fashioned way, I simple animated directly through the camera, this worked fine and I actually found it more useful.

Now the animating is done and my back was killing me, what’s next?

The first shot I had done was through StopMotion so the images where the right size, however the images I had taken from the camera where a different size then the images taken in StopMotion, so from shot two, three and four I had to go through and resize every single image. Time consuming yes, but I did it through Photoshop and was able to make a setting that would copy everything I did and I was able to reply that setting over and over to each image.

After this I had to do the fix ups, in my film I had wire on the back of Emily’s skirt to keep her from falling over, I had to go through and Photoshop this out completely image by image. I did this with the stamp tool.

Another thing I had to fix with the stamp tool was the eye blinks on my red and purple character, as when they blinked there was still white from their eyes visible.

My Clay scene is done and to finish it off I will be taking it into Adobe After Effects and in the end it will be lightly snowing over the top of the scene, which is going to be beautiful!