Mirkokosmos is my personal website and weblog, mainly concerned with my hobby - stop motion animation using plastic toys.
Mirkokosmos is my personal website and weblog, mainly concerned with my hobby - stop motion animation using plastic toys.
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I collected very little “behind the scenes” material while making “Remake”. Here are two photos and some animation tests as a flash movie. Two animations are shown, both copied from Edward Muybridge. First, you will see the original photographs, then the paper cut-outs I made and finally the shot from the finished movie.
Being an entry to the Steinerei 2006, this film had to be a picturisation of an existing piece of literature and one where the copyright has exceeded. This theme had been made known on brickboard.de right after the 2005 event. And yet, I only decided to do this story in the beginning of this year, why is that? I don’t know. I had planned to do something bigger - the Nibelungenlied, an epic poem written in Middle High German and probably among the oldest German literature there is - but at the end of 2005 it became clear that that was too big for the remaining time. I had to go for a story that I could handle more easily.
The Fisherman and his Wife was shot in the course of about three months, too little to do everything as thoroughly as I had wished. In order not to let my perfectionism ruin everything (by making me redo shots I don’t like and thereby losing time) I animated scene after scene without checking the results. When I then started post production, I had already dismantled all the sets and doing shots again would have been nearly impossible. Some shots turned out better than I had expected, for some I had animated to few frames, which I solved by using loops and stills. If you look close enough, you will also notice some mistakes where things move without reason. But, well, nothing is perfect and in retrospect I am glad I did it this way, the film would not have made it to the festival otherwise.
Some trivia:
Technical Stuff
Some people have asked me how the live action shots were done. I own a Pentax DSLR which I have been wanting to use for time laps photography (without using a computer). That camera has a socket for a cable release which is for an ordinary 2.5mm phone jack, you just have to short circuit the pins to take a photo. My self-built interval timer is based on a kit from Conrad Electronic, which can be set up to trigger from every 200ms to 100s. For the film however, I used a Nikon Coolpix 885 camera, which unfortunately cannot be remote controlled easily - no software and no IR sensor. The only way to remote control it seems to be a proprietary cable remote that would have cost me more than the camera itself. So, in order to use this camera for stop-motion, I had to tinker an extra socket to connect my interval timer (foresighted as I am, it also has a simple button to release a single frame). Soldering on the cameras SMD board was quite a challenge and the camera is unusable for anything else now. But I can now use the camera with that box to take single frames as well as do time laps photography. The live-action shots in the movie were done at a rate of one frame every 5 seconds and I simply moved a little slower. All shots where things seem to fly were done standard masking techniques using Gimp.
Hardware and software used:
