Practising making our Drama

Before we even start thinking about filming our Children's TV Drama we have to have some practise.
Today we practised using Stop Motion Animation for the first time which had some positives and negatives.
Firstly we set up a setting where the filming would take place using the back wall of our media class and green screen. This was easy to do but then we had to set up three lights all at different angles around the table. This took us a while but we have to be very careful with lighting equipment as you can get hurt using them inappropriately. After setting up the lighting equipment we got a Nikon D60 DSLR camera with a tripod and placed it a few centre metres from the table. Once we had every thing in place we needed something to film. We chose a remote used to work the whiteboard as we didn't have any Lego. When we placed the remote on the green screen and turned the lights and camera on we could see straight away there was a big problem. The remote had shadows all round it, this is a problem because when the film goes on Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and we replace the green screen for a background of our choice the shadows will still be there. So we had to play around with the lights a lot until we got rid of the shadows on the remote. Once we had done this we could begin to film, Zack took the pictures on the camera and I had to very slowly move the remote across the green screen after every shot he took. This took around 20 minutes to do a few seconds clip so you have to have a lot of patients. After doing this we had to follow the following instructions:

# Press the menu button on the back of the camera
# Press the down arrow, then OK to select "retouch" menu
# Press the down arrow again and OK to select the "stop motion movie" option
# Press OK to select "create movie"
# Select your starting and finishing image using directional arrows and the OK button
# Press OK to save, then OK again to preview

After viewing our short film we could see there were a few problems, such as:

1- Still shadows reflecting off the remote
2- Shadows of my reflection were in a few shots
3- remote being moved to fast and jump cuts were obvious
4- In one or two shots my hand was in the shot because the picture was taken to quickly

We have to learn from these mistakes and in our next practise we aim to avoid all of them. We can do this by taking our time when taking shots and the person moving the object should step a metre away from the setting so there shadow will not reflect off the lights.

We got rid of the frames we didn't want by selecting "edit" after viewing the film. We then removed the SD card from the camera and put it in a computer. We then opened up Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 where we selected file then import to get our animation which had a .avi file in drive "p".

Once we did this we could experiment with the tools on the software. We removed the shadows using the fade tool and then turned the green screen red by selecting colour background.

Overall we have had a lot of fun using Stop Motion Animation and have learnt a lot like how we will avoid the mistakes we've made and how we are going to use this in our Children's TV Drama. In my next blog post I will be talking about how we did this again but with Lego.

This is the link to our first practise using Stop Motion Animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znJDznjrM0w