Today, the seventh day of my
first 7ism work,
herewith my report and results.
Decided to start with something
small and insignificant so I chose to make an improved
version of my stop-motion animation NOT a celebrity, the
first rough cut of which I posted here last
month. Since I declared then that I was definitely
going to improve it, this seemed like a good way to test
the 7ism movement's
effectiveness.
My usual approach is to declare
that I am going to do something, then put whatever it
is on the shelf (virtual or literal) with all the other
things I have declared I am going to do in the immediate
future. In my vocabulary, the word immediate is
elastic and infinitely stretchable. Unfortunately, reality
doesn't understand my vocabulary. Hence the pile-up of
broken declarations, which 7ism is going to fix.
I hope.
I began at about 2:30 pm on
Tuesday, November 8th. The first requirement was to devise
a more efficient arrangement to hold the
camcorder.
A book I have (Get
Started in Animation)
includes a diagram for building a simple copy-stand with
camera mount. While the plan is perfectly feasible, I
didn't want to spend too much time on this so I opted
for improvisation, my favourite modus operandi.
An old portable easel was
given a new function which you can see in the photos
below. I pushed the normally vertical canvas-supporting
arm into horizontal position, adjusted the legs to the
needed height and tightened all the bolts. Then (here's
the clever bit) I took one of those tiny tripods available
in any camera shop, put its legs together flatly and
taped it down firmly to one end of the easel's
horizontal bar. The camcorder could then be screwed into
the reclining mini- tripod, allowing the camera lens
to point straight down. I attached
a cable to connect camera to power socket and a Firewire
to link my Mac to the camera (I'm using iStopMotion software).
The above photos were taken in
the downstairs study where I ended up making the third
and final version, but I first set up the rig in my upstairs
studio. By the time I was ready to shoot, daylight was
gone and I had a lot of trouble positioning lamps
even when using daylight bulbs. Version Two
was a big headache (literally) for many reasons but I
learned a useful lesson.
When something doesn't work because
I haven't prepared well enough, my usual tendency is
to keep nagging away at the
faulty item until I've knocked it into some kind of unsatisfactory
order, even though a much more effective solution would
be to start from scratch.
I went through my old routine in the second version and
wasted several days painstakingly re-drawing frame
after frame of a whole sequence because I'd filmed
it too close and some of it was out of frame. The obvious
answer was to re-shoot it. But no, I had to be the masochist.
However, because this was a 7ism project
and I was committed to it, I then threw
out all those files I had so obsessively been re-doing,
re-uploading and... well, you don't want to know every
twist and turn of that winding road....decided to do
a third version. That's when I moved everything downstairs.
Finally here are the two versions
of NOT
a celebrity my seven days produced. The animation
is still not even close to perfect but I'm satisfied
with this particular project and pronounce 7ism a
success in enabling me to finish something I probably
would have abandoned.
All comments/criticisms etc. are
welcome.
