Nice to Meeteor You_Title_Designed

First Look on the title~

I struggled on my title for a long time because I can not find the right font that fits...
The other day, when I was at a Japanese book store, I happened to noticed a typographic book then I took a look just for fun. And I saw a sketch that the word looks so nice with curve and circles. I told Dustin, that is it! That is the feeling of my title I was kept looking for.

Dustin designed this font for me that turns out really good for my film title.

The magic is how to make it moves with animation. When I looked at this title, I was picturing the circles on every end of stokes is a bubble that comes out from the box in my film. They will all have a type of personalities and make people feels that they are alive. While I was still planing about the animation, Max Hattler was brought in as a guest speaker one night for our seminar class. He showed one of his film, a very large increase, in which bubbles are spinning splitting, and merging. I watched that film before and I totally forgot about it at that time. I grabbed Dustin's arm and yelled quietly, "that is my bubbles! I want my title has that feeling!"

After three days, I got this.

This is the rough animation of the title.

When The Sun Finally Went Down

This is a interesting shot. The difficult part is to set up the light. I need to set the lights at proper spots where they looks nice and real when they are changing.

The changing of lights is controlled by the DMX box on which I need to set key frames that make lights change. After checking the light effect on almost every frame(every 10 frames probably), I can sit aside and rest when the Dragon is taking pictures along with the changing lights.

After the light finished changing, the sun went down. There is a silent moment and then the cat will be back to alive. I want it be subtle enough to confuse part of the audience. I was hoping that part of people can not notice the ear moving in the end.

The cat head was made by resin and hard foam. So the ears, of course, can not move at all. I cut off  the ear that needs to be animated and "transplant" a new ear made of soft foam with wire inside. No one can notice the material of two ears are different after I covered them with fabric.

The cat has tie down hole only on the feet. To secure his body on the ground with laying down pose, I used about 12 bug pins to "nail" him down.

When the sun comes down

Mikushi thinking...(about dinner)

it was so fun to create the background sky color.

and then...we got this picture~

This one shot is definitely disaster, because the wrinkles on the fabric is sooooooo obvious...Fortunately I can fix it in the post.

Mikushi VS. Flower

Mikushi...why your arm is so short...why your knee can not bend more...why you took the key from that poor flower...why...

Making Progress. Kind Of.

Lighting in Real Shot

        Lighting is really hard and important in stop motion project. In order to re-create the real natural lights in the real world, especially outdoor sunlight, I need to use some big light and huge bouncing board to  mimic the flat key light. Also, bouncing light comes from every where in real world. However, in the stop motion room, in which all the walls except ceiling is pitch black, there is hardly have any bouncing light. C-stands and big white or silver foam board can do a really good job, but also occupy most the room that you need to stand at or access to the puppet. 

        I checked out three C-stands from PEC, and two of them can only act as light stand because I use the knuckles with baby plate to set fluorescent lights on the floor to create that background sky. Beside, there are other two C-stand used as support of the back drop.

        In order to save the only other two C-stands to good use. I shoot a light onto the ceiling directly, trying to create a big head bounce, but it doesn't work very well in every shot. Plus, the number of lights is limited too. 

        Most of time, I use two lights to light up the puppet and background hills. The surprise effect it create is that the hot spot and some darker spot make it looks like the shadow created by clouds. 

        When it comes to the foreground, things can be messy. I use small lights to light up some plants but it sometimes doesn't do me any good but just create multiple shadows on the ground. Another way to do it is shoot fore ground separately with FL/BL. It can achieve a better result with lighting effect. However, the technique of FL/BL require the object that being filmed to be sure in focus, otherwise the post keying alpha channel can be another nightmare. In this case, faking out of focus and perspective is added to the post workload.  

Test Pictures

18mm/non-full sensor

18mm/non-full sensor

18mm/non-full sensor

composited with scales

35mm

composited with scales