Final bit of stop motion...

Today I'm generating the last piece of stop motion, after today I will have all the raw animations completed, these last scenes will need the sea adding over the next couple of days and and there are a few post productions tweaks needed on the rest of the animation, but it's all coming together it seems.

I've added in some rigging that can be seen as the ship spins around, this was from a photograph I took in Hartlepool a few months ago. (Forward panning at it's very best!)

The next scene set up mid animation with cat fur cannon smoke!

How things look at the moment with the sky and rigging dropped into the background.

And then:

The next couple of scenes relied on an armada of ships in bottles sailing across the screen:

Tediously edging each ship along why rocking at the same time, they're raised up on boxes to get a nice low angle from the camera.

I'm now working on dropping them into the classic old animated sea scene, something I've wanted to have a go at ever seeing The Tale of How at the beginning of the course.

Crows Nest Scene and the magic of Green Screen

Today I worked on my mini green screen studio. I downloaded Dragonframe a few months ago specially for this part of the animation although waited until now to install it as it's only a months free trial (tho you annoyingly only get to animate 50 frames in project so have to set up new projects every 2 seconds)

I've hardly got a professional set up other than the digital SLR and so cobbled things together with a gorilla camera tripod on a pile of books with three dining room chairs, 3 house hold lamps and a broomstick.

The results of my first stop motion scene are satisfying enough though.

Shot in-front of green screen

Green keyed out in After Effects, background added and lighting/colouring of the scene tweaked.

There will be more to come over the next week.

The boat scene:

I think I'm now happy with the introduction of the Battle of trafalgar scene, I've added the sky, switched off the books on the table as the camera spins, added some collapsing masts, whacked in some cannon fire smoke and funked up the wood textures for the ships. Don't get me wrong, I've spent a lot of time on it but not as much as it probably looks, the wood texture looks so great but it's simply the panels of my dining table coloured up dark or light depending on whether the ships are the goodies or the baddies. They're not supposed to look like real ships, just a freaky map scene where little wooden sailing ships mimmic the battle (very briefly) Chuffed with the outcome though.

The render has been set up with various ships spread out over 5 different buffers so I'll have alphas to play with and add some more smoke in after effects later.

Today has really been a tidying up loose ends day, I've really worked on tidying up the narration, chopping it into bits, and sorting the levels, compression, clipping the ends of each part so they don't pop and fitting it nicely to the animation I've put together so far.


Oh as another recent development I was looking to add a little reflection into the sea/map and have found this cool water effect...

The reflection will be key-framed so it increases from zero as the camera comes down to sea level.