TRANSFORMER
As a lighting designer working in non-cinematic productions, I thought it could be a fun experience focusing on lighting for this stop motion assignment. In this animation we used single light source to lit our subject. There was zero ambient light. All the colorful lighting was done using Rosco's lighting filter swatch book and one flashlight emitting cool white light.
First of all, it was incredibly difficult to find a private space that can go completely dark on ITP's floor. We eventually occupied the gender neutral bathroom and taped over the emergency light in it. Second, when shooting with Stop Motion Studio I had set this in portrait mode, which was supposed to frame it within the black background. For some reasons when exported to gif, it turned out to be in default aspect ratio, like the result below. Francisco convinced me that this actually looks better than the cropped version because we get to see more movements and even our process.
We also underestimated the figure's mechanical limitation. It was obviously not designed to make delicate movements so we were having hard time fine-tune its steps. Having to constantly pay attention to our own shadows was also an important lesson.
FIRE
I thought this surprisingly turned out pretty good! We took reference of a papercraft fire that was cleanly shaped. Francisco was worried about his scissors skill and that he made a bunch of abstract shapes. I thought they actually gave our fire personality and the animation feels more authentic. One difficulty we faced this time was to mount the cellphone pointing straight-down. Eventually we did it with the combination of bar clamp, spring clamp, and a small cellphone tripod. Another difficulty was that I decided to start with iPhone's built-in camera app because I thought we needed the crosshair for leveling, and I forgot we didn't need it as soon as we had the camera mounted. All the photos were taken in 90 degree rotation and when imported those photos to Stop Motion Studio, I wasn't able to rotate them 90 degree in batch. So, every single frame you see below was manually edited in iPhone's Photos app.
I learned that for stop motion production, it's important to have proper equipment set up and clear understanding of the tools.