Thursday, June 5, 2008

Documenting Judder


Now that my external hard drive is repaired and back I uploaded some of the documentation from 'Judder'. This was my ceiling camera rig! It's a 3x5' steel plate (with a lovely wood veneer - it was an old desk) bracketed to the ceiling. A monopod is held by a large magnet (originally used for hauling boats out of water) with a tripod head attached at the other end. The camera attaches and films upside-down. This gains access to areas normally obscured by the set and allows for easier perspective for some shots. The monopod could retract up to approx. 1' from the top of the rig, down to level with the set.

The streets, routered but not stained. The car is made of foam and will have LED's running off of batteries added, covered with foam coat and painted.

Staining the streets and beginning a tree.

A chaotic shot of the set in progress.

The sidewalks curve away from streetlights. Streets are routered and sidewalks are dremmeled.

To save time I inset all the tiedown screws ahead of time for the girl walking down the street. This was before I bought wingnuts, the greatest invention ever! The set was so large for some locations I needed someone to sit under the set and control tiedowns for every change while I held the character in place above.

Her umbrella frame, soldered together.

Her dress, hand stitched, on the Model Magic mockup of the character.

An idea of the scale of the first two characters. All characters in the other 2 sets are approx 6" tall.

The original streetlight design, changed as the light was too scattered.

Before I bought a cable remote for my camera I was using a wireless one - which turned itself off after 5 min or so. So if I wasn't ready for the pic I'd snap a disposable pic off to keep the remote working - and added extra light to the scene so picking them out and deleting later would be easy. The new cable remote is soo much less stressful!

A cut scene, as the LED streetlights failed during shooting. Would have been a focus pull of the girl walking down the street through the window of a house.

One of my exposure sheets.

Set 2 characters, fresh from the oven.

A bounce test before filming set 2.

Set 2 balls and characters pre wire and rig removal.

My main character's arm snapped off during the last shots - so I made a shoddy replacement by wrapping the armature wire around his body.

This was to get the shots from his perspective on the swing.

This was the camera rig used for his perspective view on the swing. The rotation disc is the same one used for the rotation when the kids are playing with the bin of school balls.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You are friggin' amazing. I am blessed to know an artist of your caliber. I love your workarounds and innovative tricks to do things as they're needed. That is a mark of someone who has a future in this artform. I like the way you think on your feet and never back down from a challenge, no matter how big it is.

Your boyfriend is very luck to have you.


Pram

Blue said...

Amen Don - you ARE friggin' amazing. This is just great to see. I can't tell you how happy it makes me.