making of

Creating the Characters

I made the characters using hardening clay and twisted aluminum wire.  After I was satisfied with the skeletons I covered them with colored clay.   Click on the pictures below to see larger examples.

For more detailed instructions click here and here.  I also bought two books on animating to learn as much as I could before starting:
Creating 3-D Animation: The Aardman Book of Filmmaking
Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie
These are great books that deal with all aspects of stop- motion animation.

       Most animation is shot with film.  It looks great and  shooting frame-by-frame is very easy.  It's also very expensive.  I chose to shoot on digital video.  This is a compromise, but it's much cheaper and necessary because of the special effects I wanted to do.  It was shot of one of the best MiniDV cameras currently available: the Canon XL-1s.  This is a 3-chip camera that allows for manual focus, manual exposure, and has image quality that rivals broadcast cameras.  Since we were shooting video instead of film, we rolled 1 to 2 seconds of tape for every frame of animation.  Later, in post-production, I created the necessary still frames from the video.
       Lighting was done very simply: Two work-lights from True Value Hardware.  One light was used for lighting the background painting.  The second was used as a key light for both the set and the characters.
       The set was built on the computer desk and made of the same type of clay as the characters are made of.  The spinning column is a piece of concrete that I found at a construction site and thought would look cool in the movie. 
       The background is white poster board, spray painted blue.  This looked great on the screen for just a few dollars.  (It's hanging on my wall with the rest of our fine art).

       One of the decisions I made prior to starting was to have the film run at 15 frames per second.  This meant that each shot would last for 2 frames.  Once all of the shots were laid out, the movie could be watched - without the light saber effects.  To do that I had to turn the video into Photoshop files.  FCP has an export feature that converted each frame into a Photoshop file.

       This was a huge project and required about 15 steps per shot.  I'm not going to go into the details of explaining it here, but I will link to the tutorial video that I used to learn how to do it:
http://www.fanfilmfx.com/tutorials/photoshop/saber/index.htm
I automated many of these steps using Actions.  I would have preferred to use After Effects, but I didn't have it at the time.

Click on the next picture to see a condensed version of the creation of the effect: