ponanza

First results

This sunday we finally shot the first frames for the film. After getting up late and some initial planning we had about 3 hours left for the shoot. A dazzling total of 36 frames, equalling 3 seconds, were the result. Well, with a little more practice the output will hopefully increase to 2-5 seconds per hour.

The day offered lots of mishaps and insights:

• First, two of our large 500Watt spots burned through. They were almost unused, but the storage of several years seem to have shortened the lamp life.
• The pictures look different on each of our monitors. A calibration is useless without some kind of reference. Maybe we can borrow a calibration device and software from someone?
• Despite being fixed, one of our rocks moved when I touched it. We tried to put it back to its original position, so hopefully it won’t show on screen.
• The webcam showed a different angle and area than the DSLR camera. In the next shots we have to align them, to optimize the feedback during animation.
• Last but not least some of the joints of the coyote puppet are loose. This affects the precision of posability and sometimes we need several attempts to move it the way we want. Since the puppet is needed for the shoot, we can’t fix that right now.

Here’s a picture of the scene with temporary background for the right mood: