This is something I’ve been working on for quite a while, but I’ve realised that there are too many new things on the horizon which will take up my time (and my computers’ CPU cycles) so I’ve decided to release it as a draft rather than sitting on it until "perfect".

While there’s still some editing and motion tweaking to be done, this piece is rather time consuming to preview and render. As the action speeds up it is blending many high resolution images together for each frame.

The video compresses around 10 hours of stencil cutting into 4 minutes. Shot with the same Pentax *ist DS as my previous time lapse efforts, the camera takes around 35 frames per minute at 1536×1024. This gives plenty of leeway for pan and scan in post production if outputting to SD or lower resolutions.

This method of shooting allows a very high quality look, with minimal expenditure. I had some problems with this camera’s viewfinder focus and auto-aperture function recently, the repair quote was AU$300, while a new K100D (the new version of the *ist) is under AU$600 including a lens. With prices for digital SLRs getting this low, a proper SLR version of the ghetto timeslice rig can’t be too far away.

I’ve had 2 rented Draper Cinefold screens with me on the tour. These are relatively expensive collapsible screens which we got a good deal on for a 3ish month rental. Unfortunately their former life at dance parties outside in the elements had left them with some pretty serious battle scars. One of the screen frames had a broken hinge, as did one of the legs.

These I “fixed” with gaffer tape and strips of plywood, until we had a couple of days off between tour legs and I time for some maintenance. I realised that while the screens came with drape bars to hang blacks from, they had never been used as the drapes are an extra US$1000ish, and not really required for raves out in the bush.

It was a relatively quick fix to dremel off the rivet heads from the broken and fresh hinges and to bolt the new ones in place. Requires some 6mm bolts, washers, and some nyloc nuts if you want to be extra sure that they’re not going to work their way free as the kit vibrates its way around the country in the back of a truck.

I shot a timelapse of the fix. Not really as a tutorial, as it’s not really something which requires much explanation. More as a celebration of my return to civilization, where I can waste a couple of hours shooting and motion tracking a mundane exercise.

Peter keeps pestering me to post this video, so here you go:

Red Iceblock Melting Outside Timelapse.

This was shot in my Pentax *ist DS, with an old, beat-up, 50mm F1.4 lens I picked up in Vietnam. The “intervalometer” in this case is even more ghetto than the electronics kit I put together a year ago. It’s a 2.5mm stereo mini jack with the cable release side soldered to ground. Plugging this in makes the camera think the shutter is held down constantly. Put the camera in “burst” shooting mode and it will happily fire off a frame every ~1.7 seconds until it runs out of battery or SD card space. Drop the resulting series of JPGs into a folder, import as footage into After Effects, resize, crop, done. Pretty timelapse.

The actual shooting of this was similarly simple: The popcicle stick was attached to the tripod of a dual-500W work light with a strong magnet. 1000W of lights are sitting just out of shot, accellerating the melting process.

Advantages of this method: This is a relatively cheap way to get extremely high quality source material. The resulting video is natively 3000×2000 pixels, and shot on a camera and lens which would cost well under US$1000.

Disadvantages: I’m not sure how much of this treatment the shutter of an SLR is designed to take. Fortunately Digi SLRs are generally more professional gear, so they should be able to take a reasonable amount of punishment, and plenty of professional shooters will snap off thousands of images in a day, they’re just not quite holding the shutter down constantly for 45 minutes. I’ve used the camera on probably 20-30 of these shoots, rolled over the shot counter several times, and haven’t seen any smoke or blue sparks yet, so hopefully it will continue to work out.

While we’re on the subject of animated pieces of paper: Switchfoot’s “Awakening” has been treated to a similar workflow (frames printed and photographed) with a very different result.

StudioDaily has an interview with Brandon Dickerson, on the workflow required to put this piece together.

Ways of adding a second layer of animation to a video:

1. Composite them digitally. Use lots of tricks, like match moves, to line everything up.
2. Print each individual frame onto paper (4,133 in this case), tack them up to stuff, and video the results into a time-lapse video.

Max Tyrie chose the latter for the Modest Mouse video contest. This is probably beyond the wildest dreams of what Modest Mouse’s promoters hoped for. Viva viral. It’s funny that, as digital technology progresses, people are discovering new, more “analog” means of producing visuals.

Via the excellent Wooster Collective:
Shit We’re Diggin’: Max Tyrie’s Hand Made Modest Mouse Video

Exciting things are afoot. As hinted, I’ll be Visualisting my way around the country soon. Touring Australia = Large chunks of time sitting on a bus, so when that hits I expect to be a veritable fountain of CDMotion content (including some of that hot new NAMM gear, stay tuned), but until then it looks like things are going to be a little… cramped? I don’t expect to have much time to devote to devote to the extensive, handcrafted editorialising we’re all used to.

Which is a problem, as I have loads of awesome stuff to tell you about, and it just can’t wait two months. So my plan is to do a series of Pocket Reviews, getting all of the salient points (which are quite easy to write) without the filler (which takes time to get right).

First up: My Russian Spy Lens - the Zenitar 16mm Fish Eye - arrived today.

US$150 including shipping from East Wave BestOptics. I’m using it on my Pentax *ist DS. The Digital SLR Focal Length Multiplier is 1.5, so it’s probably closer to a 24mm lens on this camera, but still gives a beautifully wide view angle, and plenty of lens distortion.

I haven’t seen the World of Warcraft South Park yet, but I did manage to catch the recent stopmotion/claymation episode of My Name is Earl before I left Australia.

DV.com has an interview with the production leads for the segment, containing plenty of background, logistical information on how a special episode like this takes place, as well as some After Effects workflow tips, and information on flicker removal techniques for time-lapse or stop-motion photography:

Matlosz handed 1920 x 1080, 24p digital still image sequences off to Buck, who took them into After Effects.

Buck: I use a plug-in from The Foundry’s TinderBox collection called Deflicker. It has six or seven different ways to remove flicker from the stills. You can perform multiple passes with each different setting. One of the hardest things to do is keep the frame-by-frame lighting consistent.

Matlosz: Digital cameras aren’t designed to be frame accurate with luminance, chrominance, gamma, anything. Those things don’t stay consistent frame by frame. They just don’t match. That’s the one issue you have shooting digital time-lapse or digital stop-motion.

Buck: What really kills the stills is any kind of camera moves and rack focuses, so the Deflicker filter was a lifesaver. But there are times when even Deflicker falls short. Times when a light is bumped or a bulb goes out and needs to be replaced. For those kinds of problems, we adjust the levels manually to ensure frame-to-frame consistency.

I’ve dealt with some of these issues before, but even with everything locked off on a manual lens there is often some flicker remaining. Deflicker seems like the obvious answer.

Mixing traditional low-framerate stop motion photography with some beautifully composited morphs, Impactist’s Peace Corps spot is utterly stunning.

via Motionographer

The Impactist guys weighed in to the comments with these notes on technique:

We shot using a digital SLR for a number of reasons. First off, the resolution. The project was finished in HD, so of course we’d need greater than HD frame size. This huge frame also was neccessary for realignment since it was all hand held to achieve the end result where we’d be able to recompose within the frame.

There was no tracking software used, no plugin trickery. The majority of the work involved frame by frame painting and reconstruction of images. A custom solution was developed and tested prior to the actual production. No motion footage was used, everything was captured using the digital SLR.

In total, over 14,000 stills were shot over two days at eight different locations around New York City.

Hope that helped to make a little more sense of it.

Plenty of great stop motion and animated work on their site

If you take digital photos and care at all about your signal, then you should own, or be planning to own, a digital SLR camera.

Of the stuff people don’t understand about DSLRs, the easiest to explain and see is dust. You change lenses, some dust gets in and lands on the sensor, each subsequent photo displays that piece of dust. Whether you can see it or not it’s effecting your images.

Despite my love of artistic challenges, eventually I got sick of framing my photos so I could crop out the dust, so I decided to have my sensor cleaned. I visited my friendly local camera suppliers and was informed that they would send my camera away for several days and charge me AU$80 for the privilege. Their alternative was a range of ludicrously priced cleaning solutions, costing on average around 20% of the camera’s purchase price. Thanks, but no thanks.

A little googling led me to Copper Hill Images’ CCD/CMOS Cleaning Tutorial pages. The procedure seemed relatively straightforward and only a little scary, so I hunted around and found an Australian supplier for the Copper Hill products. For AU$20 more than the price of a single commercial sensor clean I purchased the Ultimate DSLR Care Kit (US$51.95 on the Copper Hill Site), containing a Basic Sensor Cleaning Kit, Lens Care Kit and SensorSweep.

A visualist with a digital camera is stop-motion video just waiting to happen. Since gaining access to a Pentax *IST DS digital SLR I’ve hacked together a functioning cable release which produced reasonable results. This was a very inelegant setup, though simple, and I feel it may put undue stress on the shutter mechanism. So I’ve been looking around for something which would allow variable-interval timelapse shooting, but not cost as much as a professional timer switch, or intervalometer.

Et Volia!

Australian electronics-nerd supplier extrordinaire Jaycar Electronics has the Countdown Timer project for AU$12.95 (+$2 for the beautifully photocopied instructions). It’s not a precise timer - the digital version costs much more - but it is adjustable from ~15 seconds - 5 minutes.

I’m no solder-ninja. The last circuit I put together was a crystal radio, and it didn’t work. This looked reasonably straightforward though, and I have the benefit of an excellent assortment of electronics equipment lent to me by a friend who didn’t know any better.