Making the Multi-Plane Setup

After a quick bit of research on the internet I had decided that the quickest and easiest way to make the setup was to buy a slot’n’lock shelf and then replace the MDF shelves with sheets of cut glass. So after a trip to Bunnings and Rapid Glass, I had my materials and went about putting it all together.

The second part of the setup involved mounting the camera to face down. The camera I would be using was my own Canon 60D, which thankfully is a fairly lightweight DSLR. After a rummage through the garage, I found an old LCD monitor mount with an articulating arm, and an old cheap stills tripod. After some tinkering, I managed to dodgy up something which would do the job, and clamped this to a shelf and counter weighted it down with some of the biggest books I could find in my house.

The books used are as follows: The Lego Big Ideas Book, The Tintin Bookset, Camping In Australia, Margaret Fulton’s Encyclopaedia of Food and Cookery and an array of other cookbooks which I don’t think I’ve ever used (namely “Jams & Preserves”). The irony of this whole situation is that I work at a bookshop, and here I am using books as mere weights.

Depth of Field

Whilst I love when things are shallow, the focus has a nice roll off and the background is glistening with pleasant bokeh, sometimes shooting wide open just isn’t what you want. 

To shoot the stop-motion, I would be using my Canon 60D and my late grandfather’s Pentax SMC Takumar 55mm f1.8, straight outta the 1970s.

Test shots above show how the objects placed on different planes look at different apertures. It was all about finding the right balance; too sharp and all the depth would be lost, too soft and you wouldn’t be able to discern important details.

I went with f11, at ISO160, with a 2” shutter speed. Thankfully in the stop-motion world, you never have to worry about not having enough light, you just lengthen your exposure time!

Production Design

After finishing the script and breaking down all the scenes, we set about figuring out how each scene would work and look. I (Emily) then jotted down the different “props” needed in each scene, and all materials that would be required to make them. Despite this planning, we still managed to take multiple trips to Spotlight, two dollar shops, art & craft stores and Kmart throughout the production.

Colours and textures are really important, especially since the general look of the animation is quite basic. I wanted materials that were interesting on their own – even before they were shaped and introduced into the animation. The lovely fabrics we found at Spotlight, scraps of origami paper, sheets of felt in almost every colour, and brown paper were among my favourite materials we used.

The sugar cane was made using balsa wood dowel; carefully painted with nine tissue paper leaves painstakingly glued to one end. Time-consuming, but produced a nice result. 

We used crushed coffee beans for soil after we realised that actual granulated coffee, although it looks nice at first, quickly reacts to moisture in the air, turning black and sticky. The irregularity of the hand-crushed beans was a good effect though.

Another issue we quickly noticed was that the reflections of props would show up in the layers of glass. We largely solved this by sticking each item to black card or colouring it in with black marker.

Lighting

The lighting was as basic as it gets. A set of CFL work-lights from Bunnings shone through some diffusion (from a 5in1 reflector). A large soft source to allow each plane to be evenly lit, and shone at roughly a 45 degree angle to eliminate reflections.

Due to the nature of CFL bulbs, the lights took about 30 mins to warm up, that is to settle at a consistent brightness and colour temperature.

A large black was hung over the camera and top half of the setup to eliminate reflected light off walls and to eliminate the reflection of the camera in the glass.

General Setup

The camera (Canon 60D) was plugged from the mini-USB port to the USB port in my iMac with a long USB cable, this allowed Dragonframe to control the cameras settings remotely, so once the camera was setup, I didn’t really need to touch it.

Sadly though, the camera had to be battery powered as we couldn’t afford to buy a power adapter, so we were constantly cycling batteries between charging and being in use. 

I also ran a secondary HD monitor with a long DVI cable to the other side of the setup, allowing Emily to work on one side, whilst I worked on the other using the secondary monitor. I also used an Apple Bluetooth keyboard to remotely capture frames etc.

Animation

With neither Emily nor I having any solid background in animation, we found the tools within Dragonframe very useful. It allowed us to draw tick marks, lines and shape overlays to position objects within the frame.

It also allows you to draw a curved path, then by typing in the number of frames, it places tick marks along the line to show you how much to move a certain object over a certain number of frames. This makes it extremely simply to do ease in’s and ease outs. 

The highs and lows of animating.