Filming and Technical Difficulties

We've begun our shooting process by setting up the first scene. Initially we wanted to set up a birds eye view shot of the scene. However this proved cumbersome when we attempted to achieve the right angle and height with the tripod. We also weren't familiar with how IStopMotion works since we never considered doing an animation before. One of the technical difficulties we encountered was the frame quality display. As we progressively took more frames, the quality would decrease and cause our viewfinder to look fuzzy. To fix this we tampered with the "view" options and found the onion skinning that made our display more clearer and indicated the prior shots situated which allowed to us accurately judge our prop's positioning on the iMac.



*UPDATE* 14/10/09

Today we were hoping to set up the equipment to avoid wasting time as we only accomplished 10 seconds from the last session. However our teacher wasn't here for the morning period so we had to inform our new supervisor to reclaim the equipment due to their security policy. Luckily our props were immediately available so our delay wasn't significant.

In the meantime, we also received feedback from last lesson suggesting that we remember to include a variety of camera shots. This would ensure a better editing pace and it would keep the audiences interest by not having a single shot of long duration. For now we'll be focusing on capturing the main shot list we story-boarded on the time line and then snap the extra frames (consisting close ups, tracking, panning etc) to compliment the editing stage.