Post 16 | Set Completion, Frustration, and Shooting
This post is quite delayed but for a variety of good very frustrating reasons, the most recent reason being that I drafted a beautiful long picture-filled post last night and then my computer conveniently froze and shut down and I lost everything! So I’ll try to recreate it to a lesser extent today.
The other major reason is that I’ve been shooting! And I just have lost so much time to update this blog! I’ll review these past weeks chronologically.
I finished my set! Since the previous post, I mainly worked on the final prop details, including all the pivotal plot props. For the carrot pot, which I need to shoot in both large and small scale, I purchased the perfect normal size pot that I tried to make in small. I made the pot out of Sculpey and then had my talented friend, Teresa, paint the floral details to match.
I also made all the carrots and the knife prop, which has a great shine that I got from silver nail polish. Images can be seen below in the context.
After gluing everything down, and then making sure there were no hot-glue strands left in the set, I was ready to light! With the help of dearest Lori, I moved my set to the room next door to begin.
Unfortunately, for technical reasons, I had to begin my shooting for this film with my most challenging scene to animate. The lighting, however, wasn’t too much of a struggle as it is an exterior shot. For this shot, I ended up using only two lights, and then a 3rd later to mimic a spotlight: one was used for direct sunlight--creating sharp shadows, and the second to light the painted blue sky behind the fence. I had a piece of foam core to bounce a bit of light into the dark parts.
The reason this first shot was so challenging is because of my hasty design for the spontaneously growing leaves. In this shot, the Mom character appears in the garden after Lisa begins to hallucinate plants growing and a carpet rolling out. My initial plan was to have the mother dance with nothing else moving in the scene. Foolishly, however, I had each of the leaves secured with only Dollarama sticky tack and a bit of electrical tape, and naturally they were really not secured at all. This meant that every time I had to touch the puppet to animate it, I would have to try and put back the leaves that moved out of place. After a bit of a breakdown once the leaves moved so much that I couldn’t put it back, I finally decided to just animate the leaves as well and go with the flow of fate. This was a hallucination scene after all, so I should have realized earlier that I had a bit more flexibility than usual. Ultimately, I think this was a happy, though initially dreadful mistake and the shot might be better now! Here is the setup I had:
And here is a final shot (retouched a bit, but I don’t think I like this look very much).
GIFs of my animation will come later, when I have a bit more time!
The kitchen shot was a whoooole other story re-lighting. For this shot, I put a lot of effort into making the set a big variety of reflectivity. To contrast my past stop-motion film, I tried extra hard to make everything shiny to make for an interesting lighting scape. For this reason, lighting the kitchen to show off all the fun surfaces was quite a challenge. I started off with a basic light setup: two lights for the outside to be seen through the big window and glass sliding door, creating a nice realistic overexposed space and also lighting the kitchen interior quite significantly. The other light was the tiny christmas light put into the mini hanging chandelier. This was almost enough light, but I wanted the kitchen to be quite pink and lit enough to see everything. I struggled a bit with some creative solutions, one being to have diffused light bounced off white foam core, but this just white-washed my carefully pink designed kitchen. Finally I got the help of the brilliant Lydia Lorrain, a stop-motion filmmaker who had some great tips that truly tied the lighting together.
Lydia suggested that instead of bouncing light off of white foam core, I use a pink surface if I wanted to make my kitchen pinker. She also suggested that instead of leaving parts of my ceiling open or completely closed off, that I use plexi and brown paper to allow some diffused warm light into the kitchen. The final result was really perfect, and can be seen with the header image and this image below:
Note the knife and the carrots! And here are some pics of the lighting set-up and bit of a sneak peak of the kitchen shots.
As of today, I’ve officially finished all my shots in the kitchen! Here’s a screenshot of my greening production schedule (yes means done!)!
For a lot of these kitchen shots, I’ve had to use an omni-slider, typically used for camera moves. I did use the slider for camera moves, but it was also useful to get the camera deep into the set where a tripod or magic arm wouldn’t reach. Here’s a pic of the slider oriented for the through-window kitchen shot, and of me looking through the window.
And lastly, here is a picture of poor Lisa, finally with her finger permanently cut off. Throughout these many weeks, Lisa has broken on me FIVE TIMES!!! It has been overwhelmingly frustrating having her leg joint dislocated after I had spent 3 months on her armature making sure she was tough as steel. Finally, today, I took out the joint and resoldered it to give it integrity once again. I hope this is the last time she’ll ever break because otherwise I might flush her down the toilet out of rage, which would probably be a bad idea. Cutting off her finger was not as rewarding as I expected :(
That’s all I have time for now! Yay, this post didn’t delete! TTYL
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