I’ve always been fascinated by stop-motion animation techniques, whether the medium is clay, legos, or real live people.  I’ve played around with stop-motion from time to time, but never on a paid project until recently.

About a month ago, I got to team up with fellow Cinemablographer Stephen Henderson (one of the best parts of my job is getting to work with really cool people) to shoot a stop-motion commercial for a valet parking company.  I thought I would share a few lessons I took away from the experience.

1. Stop-motion takes longer than you think.

I knew that stop-motion consumes production time like a black hole sucking in a cloud of cosmic dust, but of course, I still over-scheduled.  My script called for twenty-one individual shots, which I had thoroughly scripted and storyboarded.  Given our production window of about six hours, I should have cut about four of them.  (I ended up cutting some extraneous shots in post anyway.)

2. Shoot lots of frames for small actions.

During editing, I found myself wanting more frames for the tiny nuances of motion that really sell the illusion of continuous action.  For example, in one shot, a hand reaches into the shot to open a metal cabinet door.  We shot frames for the hand reaching in and pulling the door open, but we didn’t get enough frames of the fingers actually grasping the handle of the door.  The shot works, but it could have been a lot more convincing.

3. Shoot lots of frames for pauses and timing.

With stop-motion, it’s tempting to only shoot frames when there’s something going on.  Instead, get in the mindset of shooting frames whenever time is passing in your finished shot.  If the actor is just standing there thinking for a few seconds, shoot a few seconds worth of frames while he does it.  You’ll need those frames in editing to fill the time.  Stretching one or two frames over a long span of time will break the visual continuity of the stop-motion effect.

4. Sound effects are essential.

This is true of any film or video production, but sound is especially critical for stop-motion.  Because the motion is inherently unrealistic, the audience needs the soundtrack to help them interpret the images.  A well placed sound effect goes a long way to convey an action, even if your image sequence is less than perfect.

With stop motion, you can’t really record the sound in sync with the shot, but you can act out the shot for sound in order to match it up with the video later.  It also works to do your own foley after the fact; stop-motion is very tolerant of unrealistic sound effects.

So those are my tips, based on my first serious stop-motion project with live actors.  Any questions or wisdom from your own experience?  Let me know in the comments.

Jobs built products around ideas, and in turn his products changed our ideas. Our ideas about how we interact with a computer. Our ideas about who can interact with a computer. Our ideas about media and entertainment: where we get it, how we consume it, how we produce it, how much it should cost.

Imagine a world in which the mouse-driven graphical user interface had taken an extra five or ten years to evolve, and had done so in the hands of IBM and Microsoft with no major competitor forcing them to raise the bar on quality and usability. Computing would still be a frustrating, opaque experience for most people. How would that have affected the development of the internet, which depends mostly on non-technical users to generate content?

Imagine a film industry in which Pixar had died as a small, unsuccessful startup, taking a massive chunk of inspiration out of the competitive landscape and delaying the advent of invaluable 3D animation tools and techniques.

Imagine if it required hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment to create a simple video that today would be considered minimal in quality. I would be out of a job.

Steve Jobs’ accomplishments were not achieved singlehandedly, of course, but he was the catalyst. He took great ideas and made them happen. Even though we may not all use Apple products, we all benefit from Jobs’ unshakeable vision, which has shaped our tech-driven world in more ways than we can imagine. He created powerful tools that are an inspiration in themselves and he pushed entire industries into the next century. As a result, my work is more efficient and my dreams are more attainable. Thanks, Steve.

I recently received an e-mail from a student worker at an organization for which I’m building a new website. He is a talented young man who is just starting out in the field of web design and he asked for my advice on what resources and strategies have worked for me. Here’s an excerpt from my response to him:

From what I can see, you’ve made a great start at achieving your professional goals. For one, you’re working in a real, live IT department, which must be a huge educational asset. Also, you have the professionalism and people skills that will take you far in any industry. And by starting with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, you’re tackling the most fundamental skills for web design. To build on that, I can definitely recommend some good resources for the self-taught web professional, because that’s how I learned.

One of the best resources on the web is SitePoint.com. I own lots of their books (all good), subscribe to several of their free weekly newsletters, and have read countless articles on their site. SitePoint constitutes the majority of my continuing professional education. One of the great things about SitePoint is that they provide resources not only for web design and development, but also for business skills, which are absolutely crucial, in my opinion.

The HTML5 Boilerplate is another must-see. It’s a collection of the brightest ideas, best practices, and most progressive techniques for building modern websites. I’ve learned a ton from picking through it.

Regarding Javascript, I consider jQuery to be nearly indispensable. jQuery makes Javascript development so much more efficient and less prone to browser compatibility issues that it’s hard to imagine living without it. And you don’t have to master Javascript first; you can start using jQuery immediately and you will naturally learn more Javascript in the process. (When I started out, I had the misconception that jQuery was going to be like a separate language, but it’s not.) Here’s a Javascript article on QuirksMode.com that contained a few Aha! kind of moment for me, especially the part about why Javascript is an object-oriented language. (Probably something I would have picked up in a computer science class, if I had ever taken any.)

The next thing I would recommend for a web designer is Photoshop. You have to have it and you have to learn it. I don’t have any specific advice on learning Photoshop other than plan to spend a lot of time with it. (If you want to get into the head of Photoshop, look up John Nack.) Along with Photoshop, study good design in general. Design Festival is an excellent design blog.

Also start playing with CMSs. WordPress is great, but they all follow the same principles. Try something like Pulse CMS (the free version) if you want to get your feet wet without a steep learning curve.

Depending on where you want to go professionally, consider delving into a server-side language sooner rather than later. I’m a PHP guy, which suites me well because it’s well-documented, has a great community, and it’s the language of WordPress, my CMS of choice. You may end up leaning towards Ruby on Rails or .Net. Even if you don’t want to be come an out-and-out web developer, you’ll probably need a working understanding of at least one server-side language. If you take it to the next level and build up your skills in one of them, that will make a huge impact on your marketability.

And speaking of marketability, I’ve found that the wider my variety of skills, the easier it is to make a living. I make about half my income from video production (which I studied in college) and half from web design and development (in which I am self-taught). This may not be true of everyone, but I’ve seen more success from diversifying than specializing, particularly as a small business owner.

So… that’s my advice and my experience. Sorry, I didn’t mean to write a book! I hope some of that information is useful to you, and good luck on your journey. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

Likewise, if any Cinemablography readers have questions about getting started in web design or have resources that helped them, feel free to let me know in the comments.

“If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”

-Andrei Tarkovsky in Sculpting in Time

The “easy” scenes are usually the ones that have been floating around in my head the longest, the ones I think about involuntarily while running errands and lying awake at night (my passive writing time).  These scenes are already more developed in my mind, so it’s easier to get them on paper.

Once I’ve written the easy stuff, three interesting things happen:

1. Writing the easy scenes gets them out of my head.  Once empty, my head can start filling up with new scenes.
2. The easy stuff provides context and motivation for the hard stuff, making it easier to write.
3. Sometimes the hard stuff isn’t necessary after all.

These are things my high school English teachers tried to tell me, but it’s just now sinking in.  So far I’ve been surprised at how much more productive this simple principle has made my writing time.

Final Cut Pro X has been controversial, to say the least.  It has a slew of interesting tricks up its sleeve, but professional editors are up in arms about the omission of basic features.  I have my own opinions about FCPX, but that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I am currently a very satisfied user of Final Cut Studio 2, which includes Final Cut Pro 6.  In 2009, when Apple released an mild update to the suite, I didn’t feel compelled to upgrade.  With one exception, there simply were not any new features or enhancements that would have significantly improved my life as an editor.  That exception was the expansion of the ProRes family of codecs to include ProRes 4444, ProRes LT, and ProRes Proxy.  ProRes 4444, with it’s alpha channel, is especially useful for graphics and chromakey work, where it can replace the system-choking Animation and PNG codecs.

I decided to wait it out and skip a version of FCS, eagerly awaiting the next release, which Steve Jobs assured me would be “awesome” and that I “would love it.”  Well, FCPX may be awesome in a lot of ways, but it’s not for me.  I probably won’t be buying it, at least not in it’s current incarnation.

But that leaves me with one problem: I still want all the ProRes codecs!

That’s where the title of this post comes into play.  Apple’s new suite-less distribution model means that you can buy Compressor 4 on the cheap ($49.99) without investing in FCPX ($299.99).  And guess what comes with it?  Yep, ProRes.  (And a few other handy codecs.)  I should note that Compressor 4 does not work with previous versions of Final Cut (before X), so if you’re a Final Cut Studio user, you’ll want to keep your old version of Compressor around, too.

Once you buy Compressor 4 from the App Store, you can go here to download the ProApps QuickTime Codecs installer.  (You can’t run the installer unless you have Compressor 4, Motion 5, or FCPX installed.)  Then you should have access to all that ProRes goodness in your video applications of choice.

“…the opportunity cost of our lives appears to us to be the value of all the foregone alternatives summed together, not merely the best other one. When all the possibilities were yet still before us, it felt as if we would do them all.”

-Robert Nozick (quoted here)

I’m finishing a video right now, I filmed so much good stuff, I could go a thousand directions, but I have to finish and I have to only make one video at the opportunity cost of making all the possible others. Asi es la vida!

“No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.”

-Joseph Epstein

How can this be applied to film and film-making? I want to watch and re-watch the best movies slowly, asking questions, and looting as I go.

So… what’s the catch?

As with any new technology, LEPs have an assortment of idiosyncrasies that should be understood before one makes the leap.  Veteran gaffer Guy Holt takes an in-depth look at LEP technology and the very limited number of products that make use of it on cinematography.com.  Holt does a good job at sifting the hard data from the marketing hype.

The bottom line?  LEP lighting looks like a winner to me.  The advantages far outweigh the the quirks—in fact, LEPs seem to be much less quirky than fluorescents and LEDs.  The main problem now is the lack of products on the market, but I’m predicting that will not be the case for long.

I tend to get bogged down in the myriad of choices any particular video editing project provides, often dragging the project out, or if its a personal project, leaving it unfinished because it’s not perfect. A few days ago I read this article at the always helpful 99% website:
Don’t Overthink It: 5 Tips for Daily Decision-Making
After reading this article on descision-making, I’m going to approach my video editing this week as a satisficer, rather then a maximalist. I have a pleasant suspicion that I’ll get more done.