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I received an email from Thomas Foote (members.xoom.com/thomasfoote) inquiring
about details of how I created "Liftoff!" I thought I would share my answers
for those who are interested (I will also be updating my site with more details
at http://home.earthlink.net/~lightdog):
...
Basically the way I did the animation:
I started out by shooting some "motion tests" of a mini-fig walking. This
allowed me to define a basic "walk cycle" to determine speed of movement
(i.e.: how much a leg should move over a given number of frames). Once I
had this walk cycle defined, I could animate all the other elements in
relation to this walk cycle. What I determined was that the "skip frame"
method worked best: one movement for every two frames I advanced on the
super-8 camera. If I wanted to make a minifig "run", then I would
naturally shoot only one frame for every movement. The basic frame rate
thus worked out to nine frames a second, since I was using a camera whose
basic frame rate was 18 fps (one of the standards of super-8). The super-8
projector was also playing back at 18fps, and I transferred to film to
BetaSP at 18fps.
The way I kept track of all the movement was to develop a "movement plan"
for each shot. I would move each character in a predefined order: for
example: first the foreground left minifig, then the foreground right
minifig, then the truck, then the car in the background and so-on. Since
it would take hours to shoot a scene, it was a pretty zen-like experience.
Fortunately nobody really interrupted me while I was working.
The "sets" were basically some of the old space sets and some town sets. I
recycled the road plates and the trees for the driving shots. I shot
everything on my parent's dining room table. The orange backgrounds
consisted of bed sheets hung over chairs. I created the sense of big sets
by using sand (careful not to get too much on the floor).
The movie exists as a super8 reversal film which I then transferred to
BetaSP video. I digitized the movie for the web using a VHS copy (not the
best, but all I could do right now until I can digitize the BetaSP
footage). I rezised the movie in After Effects and exported using the
Sorenson codec at a fairly low quality and 10 fps to get the three-minute
movie down the 3.5 Mb. The audio actually takes up a significant portion of
that 3.5Mb, even though it is only mono 8 bit.
For the moving camera shots I built a camera crane out of some Marklin
parts I had around. I mounted the camera to that and just moved it along
like any of the other pieces. The fades I accomplished in-camera, slowly
dialing the iris up or down over successive frames.
The vertical jumps you see are the result of the super-8 tape splices.
Performing clean super-8 splices was a difficult task...
The flying shots were accomplished by simply having a family member (or
sometimes myself) hold the ship at the very edges so as to hide the camera
support. I experimented with large sheets of glass, but that was after I
finished "Liftoff!"
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Marc Leidy <lightdog@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I rezised the movie in After Effects and exported using the
> Sorenson codec
Any chance you could re-export with something other than the Sorenson codec
so us Unix types could view it? The still frames look like the animation
would be neat to see.
Regards,
Steve
--
Barb & Steve Demlow | demlow@visi.com | www.visi.com/~demlow/
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