The past two days were full of work on that stop-motion film I'm planning to include in my design portfolio, and today I saw it was good (always wanted to say that) so I made this little teaser.
The teaser doesn't show much of the movie itself. Instead it shows the creation process, which as I have learned by now, shouldn't be underestimated at any point of development. With the footage I have left, I could make a little Making Of documentation after I finish the video.
All I can say for now is that the (yet untitled) movie is going to be about 3 minutes long and tells the sad story of a little blob.

Awesome!!!
But how do you get your hands to move so fast?

It's a combination of my uber-1337-skills and video speed at 5000%

HarryButt wrote:It's a combination of my uber-1337-skills and video speed at 5000%

LOL
Nice work

Wow, well done Harry Butt. I didn't know you were multi-talented but I'm not surprised . Your teaser did its job!

Here are two "production shots" to push the hype.

An early shot of the set's basic background:


And another one of the "stage", where the action is taking place.

As you can see, I'm not going cheap on this. The grass consists of very slim cut paper stripes. I fit them one by one into these paper scratching posts (my cat very soon lost interest on these cheap malaysian productions and returned to our furniture ).
I want my first claymation to be as good as I can do. It's for my portfolio after all.

Yeah, and since I'm pretty much finished with the images, I'm going to put in, I'll have a Best Of here too.























God, this thread is full of self-glorification now...

the eyes are cool.

name the story "Sad Story of a little Blob" !

For mother Russia!

Nice!

Ya know (Probably not) I make klaymations also.If you watched my FOTM entry you could see on the side some klaymations that I made. if you watch them, they do have some problems I can't solve.

The only problem I saw with your videos was that they were partially too fast to understand what was going on Anyway, I'm off. Shooting Take#1.

Why thank you for watching them HarryButt.

Already encountered a lot of problems with image quality and camera shaking. Going to get into After Effects tomorrow to remove the worst crap-factor. Animation-wise the first take looks good so far, still 19 to go. Have to experiment with frame interpolation though, maybe I can make the animations a little more fluid.


Another shot showing off the characters. These caterpillar-turtles are actually pieces of soap.

Looking forward for the whole movie

HarryButt. What program are you using to create the claymation? If you aren't using any, FrameTheif is a good solution+ it's Mac only!!!

No, iStopmotion for Mac is by far the best.

First I'm importing the raw images into iStopMotion, do some first polishing by removing unnecessary frames, import the iStopMotion-project in AfterEffects (it's an uncompressed .mov-file), remove camera shaking with Tracker Controls, export into uncompressed Quicktime again, import the polished footage into FinalCutPro and apply the SmoothCam-filter, so that my video has as less shaking as possible.
The editing process is also done in FinalCutPro, because I'm used to edit videos with this, instead of Premiere, which happens to crash on my Mac anyway (usually while saving a project ).
Since I'm shooting in a non-chronological order it makes sense to split the work into scenes, so that each of the 20 scenes gets this treatment.
But my tripod is a cheap pile of crap, so even after all of these optimizations there's still a little shaking left...

I did not say it was the best torus. I said it was a good solution.

I don't know which one is better. I know both, but I got a "free" version of iStopmotion easily and now I'm working with it. Basta.
I'm almost through with half of the shooting, and here's the first screenshot of official movie footage. I'm using two layers of transparency film for that water, one on the painted paper and one above the figures to keep the reflections above them and achieve that water-gloss-effect. In the lower left corner you can see the edge of the upper film Well, I suppose, nothing's perfect.

I'm working with default DVD-resolution, which is about 700something, so my movie isn't quite HD-ready With all that shaking it wouldn't be much fun on a big screen anyway. But since my raw pictures have slightly more than HD-resolution, maybe someday... Nah, nevermind.

this one make me..well wonder, I like it, i think i know what the point is in the pic

Barfly wrote:i think i know what the point is in the pic

So? Then please tell me your thoughts.
I never expected that my stuff would have any point at all. But if people can see something, so much the better.

EDIT 26.09.:

A shot of the complete set.
The movie is halfway through. I expect finishing the last take on my birthday And then continue with post-production.

EDIT 29.09.:
It's my birthday and I'm finished with shooting and I have my 512th post, so let me have that cookie now!!11
I'm not going to rush in though, my public release date is still the 12th.

It's done!





Watch it HERE.

WOW! That was a great animation. But what was that part when the drill was drilling through the person

Broken, destroyed heart?

Very nice, but why so sad?

Oh, and btw. you really have odd dreams, mate

C.Brutail wrote:Oh, and btw. you really have odd dreams, mate

Thanks, man. I guess, that's proof enough, that I'm an artist.

It's so sad, because I want the jury's ass kicked. Therefor I go to the limit. They have to get something, they have never seen before, and I deliver.

Closing date is the 15th, so after this day my portfolio is in their hands and it's model-time again.

Hint:

wow. Just watched it - let's see if I can sleep tonight
Nice work!

HarryButt, i love this animation. Made me want to do clay some animation again And replay The Neverhood. Soundtrack fits nicely too.

If your going to do more of these here's a few hints that may be useful. If you can, get/use a camera with a remote trigger, this greatly reduces camera shake. Take more advantage of camera settings, using a narrow shutter setting is great for creating a feeling of larger scale (basically anything not in focal centre gets blurred, with distance), for example. For consistent lighting, block out sunlight. use post processing to make the light feel warmer if needed. Just like drawing, the larger the sale the easier it is to create details.

Did you say this was your first? In that case.. just wow.. come to think of it, its preddy wow in any case

I laughed my ass off. Very weird indeed.