I’ve got my little ‘production studio’ set up in a little alcove in my lovely wood paneled bedroom. My equipment included an iMac running Dragonframe (for stop-motion capture) & Garageband, an 18 x 24 inch light box, a Canon EOS 60D, a 42″ rostrum with an 18″ x 24″ base, and my ukulele.. I shot the entire animation in one take — I did all the scene transitions directly on the light box and didn’t have to edit anything together except for the fade in and fade out to credits added in post production. I ended up shooting 24 fps which means that for every second of animation, I moved the element 24 times capturing each movement with my camera in 24 shots. I think I ended up with about 760 shots total. And it actually ran a little faster than I had desired so I slowed it down a bit in post-production. I had hoped to dive into Adobe After Effects & Premiere for editing and it was just way beyond me for the amount of time I wanted to spend in post-production, so I brought the raw video into iMovie which is fairly straight forward and simple and put the final touches there.
As far as sound, I came up with this little chord pattern the morning I made it and actually recorded the music before the animation as I wanted the animation to follow a beat similar to a heartbeat which I tried to emulate in the tempo of the recording. As I mentioned in a previous post, for recording the ukulele, my software driver for my little mixing board was out of date so that was out of the question.. and I hit up radio shack for some adapters to try to plug my microphone into an iMic (basically a small amplifier with phantom power to power the mic) to run it into my computer for recording, but I got an awful buzz and almost no recording volume, presumably from the iMic not giving enough juice to the microphone.. so I ended up recording a test run straight through the computer mic and processing it with some effects in Garageband so that it wouldn’t sound so awful. Too lazy (and tired.. it was like 13 hours into the process) to re-record a final version, I just used the test run in the final video.. And I just ordered the Apogee MiC USB microphone for Macs after reading lots of good reviews and against the advice of some sound friends who whole-heartedly believe in mixers. But I’m not trying to record a platinum record, so the simpler the better, as long as it sounds decent.
The elements were all hand cut (except for my hand which was live obviously..). The bird gained movement by having a hinged head (you can’t see it in the pic but the head can move up and down) and various wing and feet positions. For each shot, I’d rotate them out to give it movement.
As far as the overall idea, I woke up in the middle of the night a few days before making it after having a dream about something, and this image of a bird flying out of a breaking heart popped into my head.. and I grabbed my iPhone and started jotting down words and the poem came to be in this final version within about two hours, and then I fell back asleep..
All in all, it was short and sweet and really exciting to make. Can’t wait to dig my heels into the next one..