Shooting Star and Clouds

   I tested shooting star by light drawing. It was so fun to work in the darkness with only a flash light.

    This is the resulting frame of composite light drawing with my footage. It was just a little bit hard to keep the drawing consistent frame by frame because Dragonframe doesn't help any in this situation. The preview pictures in Dragonframe which are suppose to allow people to check animation, are captured before the camera actually work. Therefore, the preview pictures looks so different with the actual pictures taken by the camera, especially when the camera is set up to take long exposure frames.
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 I am fabricating clouds that can be animated, and it is kind of hard.

    On one hand, I want the cloud look cute and puffy, so I picked cotton as the outside material. Because cotton naturally has the perfect ability to let part of the light though and have a soft and fuzzy edge. On the other hand, it is required to be animated, which means the clouds should have some wire or sort of armature inside to hold the shape and allow animator to control it frame by frame.

    I start with the armature. My first thought is wire. I bend wire to loops and some of them are overlapped so they can support each other that they won't be too "soft". And then I cover it with thin foam wrap. In the end, I put layer of cotton on and shape it with a felt poking needle.

    This is very rough animation test of the cloud moving with a turning key. It is kind of fast and it is not a perfect loop. I just want to see if the armature and cotton is easy enough to handle or not. It is okay if I handle it with extra care. 

    To make it easier for me, I tried a different armature: wire mesh.

    It looks cool, but it doesn't meet my need in the end. It is more rigid, stiff and stable when I touch it during the shooting but the surface still move around slightly after being touched, just like the first one cloud test. 

    There is a shot that I need the key turns and clouds be stretched and squashed. So I need to keep trying to make different clouds. 

加油！