Mirkokosmos ist meine persönliche Webseite und mein Weblog, hier geht es vor allem um mein Hobby - Stop-Motion-Animation mit Plastikspielzeug.
Mirkokosmos ist meine persönliche Webseite und mein Weblog, hier geht es vor allem um mein Hobby - Stop-Motion-Animation mit Plastikspielzeug.
“Vom Fischer und seiner Frau”, ein altes plattdeutsches Märchen, später aufgeschrieben von den Gebrüdern Grimm ist hier einer leicht modernisierten Fassung zu sehen. Dies war mein Beitrag zum Brickfilm-Festival Steinerei 2006 mit dem Thema “Literaturverfilmung”. Der Film gewann beide Preise, den der Jury, sowie den Publikumspreis.
Greedy Bricks war mein erster Film und gleichzeitig mein erster Beitrag zu einem Wettbewerb, dem 10-brick-contest im Jahre 2004, bei dem er den dritten Platz gewann. Das Ziel war, einen Film mit nicht mehr als 10 Elementen zu drehen.
Greedy Bricks erzählt die Geschichte zweier Steine, die gut miteinander zurecht kommen bis plötzlich eine Münze in die Szenerie rollt. Jetzt, wo Geld im Spiel ist, werden sie weiterhin zusammenhalten?
Das wundervolle Gitarrenstück das den Film begleitet ist von Jeff Wahl.
(Dieser Artikel existiert leider nicht auf deutsch)
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:
Read this blog in English