In order to properly gear up for the release of Reserved, the posthumous album release from Black Velvet, I dug up some recordings of the final show at Sully’s Pub in Hartford. It’s incomplete and poorly recorded, but we did get some guy to move his truck. I think. Enjoy!
Download the show here.
-Mike
The following are the things I don’t like about SpaceBase:
The following are the things I love about SpaceBase:
More spectacular progress was made today as frames 380 through 695 were thoroughly dominated. We’re also planning to do some creative reusing of a few of the angles we’ve shot so far. In a few weeks, we should know whether or not we have ingeniously saved hours of work or confused the shot sequence so severely that only hours of additional work can sort out the wreckage. Exciting!
-Mike
The following are the things I don’t like about SpaceBase:
The following are the things I love about SpaceBase:
More spectacular progress was made today as frames 380 through 695 were thoroughly dominated. We’re also planning to do some creative reusing of a few of the angles we’ve shot so far. In a few weeks, we should know whether or not we have ingeniously saved hours of work or confused the shot sequence so severely that only hours of additional work can sort out the wreckage. Exciting!
-Mike
After nearly a year of filming test shots and with one scene already in the can, we figured it was time to learn how to use a camera.
From what we can figure out, besides focal distance and zoom, there are three settings that affect the look of a shot: aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. Shutter speed was intuitive. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light is allowed to pass through to the lens. This results in a brighter and clearer picture, but also encourages the ghastly appearance of the phantom hand. Slowing the shutter speed past five or six seconds will diminish the depth of field effect coveted by semi-pro photographers and super-amateur stop motion animators (such as ourselves).
Aperture determines the amount that the shutter opens. An aperture setting of 5.6 opens the shutter twice as wide as a setting of 8, which is twice as wide as 11, and so on. The amount the shutter opens determines how much light hits the lens.
According to photo.net, ISO is apparently a swarm of bees gobbling up the light passing through the shutter. Steve likened changing the ISO to adjusting the number of photo-receptors available to take in light. An ISO setting of 100 has half as many receptors as a setting of 200. Increasing the ISO creates a brighter picture with a smaller aperture and faster shutter speed, but at the expense of adding graininess and noise.
And with that, we’re over 300 frames into our next scene. It’s nice to once again measure our progress in frames. Looks like the entire scene will end up having between 1700 and 1800 of them.
-Mike
Let us check off what is done:
We’ve put ourselves in a position to begin filming the scene between Winona and the Tutorial Screen the next time we get together. The hope is that since one of the characters doesn’t even move, the taking of photographs will go much more quickly than the first scene.
As a bonus music-related piece of news, the long rumored to be in production final Black Velvet album may actually see release within the next few months. Rumor has it that near final mixes of the tracks are being considered for mastering. Hop on over to thewaywardsoldier.com for more info from friend of the label, Jefim Piekarz.
-Mike
The short answer is yes. The long answer is the rest of this blog post.
Steve and I worked diligently on crafting the mouth animations for scene one until we got about halfway done and came up with not one but TWO brilliant ideas that completely set us off track. While implementing our original idea (which we’ll call Mouth Animation Idea #1), we realized that the animation looked like a flapping sock puppet. Sooooo
Mouth Animation Idea #2:
What if we used a black sock puppet to BE the mouths? Wait, that might be too hard. What if we used a piece of foam board leftover from set creation and put it on the end of a stick that may or may not be bamboo. Oh, and hang a green folder over it.
Mouth Animation Idea #3:
Ok, so that sort of worked. What if we actually did the puppet idea? It’d probably be way better then, right???
So maybe neither of these systems is better than using static mouth images and animating them. We are weirdly inspired to make a cell shaded puppet show though.
-Mike
Hey everybody, we’re back!
So Mike and I picked up from a slight dip in SB:I activity and started figuring out just how we are going to animate the characters mouths. Although doing the mouths in the fashion we had decided on takes a lot of the pain out of filming each scene, the post processing has its own challenges. We are definitely up to it; just look at how hard at work we (one of us) are (is)!
I swear I totally did some work too!
At the end of our session we had about 3 or 4 lines of dialog, which is a great start. And since this is something we can do on our own time we should be able to tear through the scenes as they are finished… definitely much speedier than the actual character animations themselves.
We also purchased some sweet LEDs to light some of our future scenes, and decided to combine them with a little demo of the dialog. Be warned… it got a little silly:
Next time we’ll be putting the finishing touches on our set to film the next scene… stay tuned!
-Steve
We’ve taken a week off from SpaceBase after finishing the first scene, but found the time to write and record a protest song for wrongfully accused rapper Max -B. We’re not sure of all the details… he may have organized a homicide, he may have done something terrible to someone’s grandmother, and he may be an unexcusably dangerous mix of rappers Notorious BIG, Jay-Z, and Tupac Shakur… but we’ve got his back.
Friend of the label, Jim Hernovich, helps out on the first song written as part of the One Hour Challenge. Technically, this one clocked in at about 1:15, so I suppose we failed.
We did it, folks. We saw our goal shining, like a beacon atop a mountain of clay, and we ascended to meet it in all its glory.
Then the realization hit that we are most likely only an 18th of the way to filming completion. But never mind that… Phantom Hand has returned!
He so rarely shows up to hinder our progress lately, and right before our 1,000th frame BOOM, look who’s just got back from the cutting room floor of Frankenweenie.
This time around the dry cracking bodies of our lead characters had to be addressed, and they went through some refurbishment to keep them pliable for the remainder of the scene. This first scene is really taking shape, and should be completed within the next session or two. Stay tuned for the news, and watch out for floating phalanges!
-Steve
The pace of production picked up precipitously, and probably permanently! But at what cost?
It seems as if gluing the characters to the floor and leaving them out for months might not have been the best idea. Stupid unpredictable clay! In addition, Cliff was visited by the Melty Man’s ghost and given a terrible curse. His cuff is fused to his hand, all so that he may hold onto a screwdriver. Such a dedicated employee of Sumo Inc.
The good news, though, is that we were able to bang out over 300 frames in only about four hours of work time. This was all despite some long setup times for new camera angles, which we hope to refine in the coming weeks. Also, we ate a delicious baked chicken.
Lighting was less of an issue this week, as the lights in a bag really came into their own. We also made the largest movements in the show so far. One sequence demanded the actors perform and react to special effect sparks that will be added in post. Their performances were inspired and convincing.
Until next time,
-Mike and Steve
