Stock Frame Animation

We went out with a Tri-Pod and a Cannon 550D camera and started taking photo's for Stock Frame animation. Me and Corey went to the park and set up the tri-pod and camera and started thinking of different idea's we could do for our Stock Frame animation, after a few minutes of thinking we come up with an idea and started off by gathering a few leaves together and placing them on the floor. We placed them in a circle and slow made them move away from each other, doing little movements and taking photos after every movement, each picture should work out to be at least 0.2 seconds when in a film. After slowly moving the leafs out of the circle, we started moving them back inwards taking a photo after every movement so when we put all the photographs into a film on Final Cut Pro the film will add up to atleast a few seconds long. We took roughly between 30 and 40 pictures testing out with different camera settings to get the best outcome for our photo's.

Stop Frame is a form of animation which is when you physically move and object or manipulate it then taking a photo before moving it a tiny bit more, By doing this when you link all the photo's you have taken together it gives the impression that the object  has been moving by its self. To do this you must move an object in the slightest way before taking a photo to make sure that it has a low frame rating and all smoothly plays together. Normally clay figures are the most well known objects to be used for Stock Frame animation but they are easy to reposition and move. Most Stock Frame animation photo's should roughly be at a 0.1 - 0.2 frame. So by taking roughly 5 - 10 photo's at that frame rate can produce a second long worth of film.

I found this video on youtube of a Stock Frame animation made for a University assignment. The creator of this video has put a lot of work into the making of his animation and has also been creative and thought of a unique idea. By just watching it you can tell that the frame rate must of been at roughly 0.1 seconds per photo and the video lasts for 1.43. He uses different techniques such as taking photos then playing them in the reverse order in which they was taken to add different creative effects to the animation and to make it more professional.

In comparison, The animation Me and Corey produced is no where near creative, professional or good as the creator of 'The Fruit Machine' animation, but by watching it and comparing how good and creative theirs was to the effort put into ours it has made me realise that for these sort of animations you need to be as creative as you can be and you can use any sort of object to do animation with. In the future I will use techniques that are used in 'The Fruit Machine' animation and try and apply it to my own work.

The Indoor Photoshoot

In this session we did a Indoor photo-shoot in the Photo studio using the honeycomb modifier to make the light a bit lighter/darker in certain areas. We also used the Cannon 5D, a camera stand, we used a scoop screen but when using the honeycomb modifier on the light, it focused the light down so much that it made the screen a dark grey/black colour. Everyone in our group took 10 pictures whilst standing us and messing around with the manual settings to make the pictures darker/lighter then 10 pictures whilst people was sitting down and messing around with the settings again to experiment. Everyone had a chance to be in a photo and to take a photo, To mess around with the settings and getting more comfortable using the Cannon 5D. After this session I felt more used to the settings of the Cannon 5D and felt more comfortable in being in pictures and taking them aswell

The Outdoor Shoot

We went out to an alley way and the park for an outdoor photo shoot, for this we used a Cannon 5D and used Bowens Gemini lighting and a standard tripod. We all took turns in taking photo's in different lighting to make the photo's lighter and darker depending on the positioning of the camera, the sun and the lights. The class split up into two groups and half of the class went out in the morning, the other half in the afternoon. We took roughly 10 shots of each other whilst messing with the lighting power and the shutter speed to see what sort of lighting we could do to the photo's. The session was good and we learnt how to set up lighting equipment, a bit more on using manual focus and manual settings for the Cannon 5D. After the session I feel more comfortable using the Cannon 5D and feel better setting up the lighting equipment and feel like I can set it up in the future by myself.

Halloween Studio Session

During this day, we had Kate (a make up artist) come in to college and show us on how to do make up that can be used for horror photography, She showed us how to make fake blood, how to make a burn effect on someone's face and how to make wounds/cuts/scars with heated jello. After having an hour of people doing each others make up, putting fake blood on each other and making fake scars and wounds we then went up to the photo studio in pairs and started taking photographs in which we could transform into 'Horror FIlm Posters'. We used a black background and had a green light shine from the floor upwards to make a gloomy horror effect, and everyone did different pose's which would make the photo have more effect. This project was linked in with both photography and graphics and we did it all on the one day. The pictures we took turned out good and look very effective to be used for a horror film poster. We used a Cannon 5D for this project and different lighting, and also had a big camera stand, The session was good for everyone as we learnt a lot of things.