The model is complete, but I have one major problem. The motherboard in my computer has short circuited which has slowed the project down majority, because I wasn't expecting this!! I ended up with a couple of days downtime when I couldn't access any work, but ended up working on a different system to piece together all the photographs.
The following is an in depth explanation of the photographing session:
Stage 1 - Taking The Photos
Before I started to take the photos, I thought about any problems I might come in contact with, and tried to find solutions to overcome them before they arose. For example, I know that cameras focus differently in changing light conditions, so I needed a constant source of light. To do this, I used a pitch black room (the curtains in my flat are great!!) and a desk lamp. Doing the photographing in this manner prevented any images having varied lightness and all images were equally visible.
Another problem which I had to overcome was the reflections off the Lego bricks. By the time I'd finished I was wishing that Lego had a matt finish rather than a glossy one!! I was constantly having to move objects or the camera to reduce the number of unwanted reflections. On evaluation of the finished movie, I should have been more careful at the beginning of the film when the camera shows the outside walls of the model. If you look carefully you can make out the Utterly Butterly tub that the lamp was stood on!!!
With any possible problems taken care of as much as I could, I got to work shooting the photographs. I had to make sure that each photograph was focused and exposed correctly, as any differences between photos would be noticeable when they were sequenced in post-production. I used a tripod to keep the camera steady and in the same place for each shot, and used the storyboard to try and stick to my original idea as much as possible. You will notice a few extra shots in the finished movie that don't appear on the storyboard. This was because I needed something extra to fill the ten seconds and keep the film fast paced along with the audio track.
Some of the shots required alterations to the model. For example, it was difficult to do over shoulder shots from the DJ booth and the bar, because it meant taking the entire back wall off the structure to enable me to get my camera in a suitable place to take the photos. I had problems focusing some of the shots when using full zoom with macro mode, so some photographs aren't as close-up to the characters as I wanted, but I did the best I could to get good effective stills to use in the video.
12 AA batteries and about 200 photographs later (I only used 150 for 15fps), and the shooting stage was completed.
Stage 2 - Post Production
With the photographs completed, I could started piecing them together in Adobe Premiere Pro. I previously created the titles and the credits, so the stills could just be dropped into the ten second gap that was purposefully left in the middle. Because it was a ten second video and I was using 15fps, each still image needed to be 2 frames long. I told Premiere to automatically import images so that they were two frames long by using the Edit |Preferences menu.
I had to get rid of any unwanted photographs before I imported them into Premiere. I got the image count down to 150, and it was simply a case of dropping the images in order into the timeline. Because I chose to do an animation, I couldn't do any fancy video transitions between scenes because each image is a separate frame. I thought about perhaps doing some split screen or picture in picture work, but decided against it as it would be difficult for the viewer to watch both sides of the screen of such a fast cutting movie. Because there weren't many transitions and effects used in the actually ten second film itself, I tried to include as many techniques as I could in the titles and credits to compensate for this.
Below are some screenshots and explanations of production techniques used in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Importing Images at 2 Frames Long - Use the Edit | Preferences menu to open up the General Settings dialog. Here you can set the default length that images will be added to the timeline with. The program defaults is 150 frames for each image. I set this to 2 frames so that I wouldn't have to edit the length of every single photograph.
Importing Images - Using the File | Import menu opens up a dailog box that allows images, sound, and video to be imported to the project Bin.
Adding Markers - Markers were very useful when it came to synchronising the video with the underlying audio track. Pressing the * key on the numeric keypad in time with the music added markers to the timeline, so I knew where the beats in the music were. This makes synchronisation a lot easier and the project came together much quicker than it would have done without the use of this feature.
Another problem which I had to overcome was the reflections off the Lego bricks. By the time I'd finished I was wishing that Lego had a matt finish rather than a glossy one!! I was constantly having to move objects or the camera to reduce the number of unwanted reflections. On evaluation of the finished movie, I should have been more careful at the beginning of the film when the camera shows the outside walls of the model. If you look carefully you can make out the Utterly Butterly tub that the lamp was stood on!!!
With any possible problems taken care of as much as I could, I got to work shooting the photographs. I had to make sure that each photograph was focused and exposed correctly, as any differences between photos would be noticeable when they were sequenced in post-production. I used a tripod to keep the camera steady and in the same place for each shot, and used the storyboard to try and stick to my original idea as much as possible. You will notice a few extra shots in the finished movie that don't appear on the storyboard. This was because I needed something extra to fill the ten seconds and keep the film fast paced along with the audio track.
Some of the shots required alterations to the model. For example, it was difficult to do over shoulder shots from the DJ booth and the bar, because it meant taking the entire back wall off the structure to enable me to get my camera in a suitable place to take the photos. I had problems focusing some of the shots when using full zoom with macro mode, so some photographs aren't as close-up to the characters as I wanted, but I did the best I could to get good effective stills to use in the video.
12 AA batteries and about 200 photographs later (I only used 150 for 15fps), and the shooting stage was completed.
Stage 2 - Post Production
With the photographs completed, I could started piecing them together in Adobe Premiere Pro. I previously created the titles and the credits, so the stills could just be dropped into the ten second gap that was purposefully left in the middle. Because it was a ten second video and I was using 15fps, each still image needed to be 2 frames long. I told Premiere to automatically import images so that they were two frames long by using the Edit |Preferences menu.
I had to get rid of any unwanted photographs before I imported them into Premiere. I got the image count down to 150, and it was simply a case of dropping the images in order into the timeline. Because I chose to do an animation, I couldn't do any fancy video transitions between scenes because each image is a separate frame. I thought about perhaps doing some split screen or picture in picture work, but decided against it as it would be difficult for the viewer to watch both sides of the screen of such a fast cutting movie. Because there weren't many transitions and effects used in the actually ten second film itself, I tried to include as many techniques as I could in the titles and credits to compensate for this.
Below are some screenshots and explanations of production techniques used in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Importing Images at 2 Frames Long - Use the Edit | Preferences menu to open up the General Settings dialog. Here you can set the default length that images will be added to the timeline with. The program defaults is 150 frames for each image. I set this to 2 frames so that I wouldn't have to edit the length of every single photograph.
Importing Images - Using the File | Import menu opens up a dailog box that allows images, sound, and video to be imported to the project Bin.
Adding Markers - Markers were very useful when it came to synchronising the video with the underlying audio track. Pressing the * key on the numeric keypad in time with the music added markers to the timeline, so I knew where the beats in the music were. This makes synchronisation a lot easier and the project came together much quicker than it would have done without the use of this feature.
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