Subject:
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"Liftoff!" Lego animation details
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Tue, 1 Feb 2000 19:06:36 GMT
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Viewed:
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1398 times
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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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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: "Liftoff!" Lego animation details
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| (...) 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 (25 years ago, 2-Feb-00, to lugnet.general)
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