Final Movie

And here we are.  Yup, I actually finished it.  Please watch on Youtube in HD.

I hate GIMP.

Another vent post.

Do you draw with a mouse or do you have a tablet with a pen?  I use a pen and I love pressure sensitivity feature.  Why GIMP developers didn't think about this option?  I mean, it exists, but they hid it really well and it is a hassle to turn it on every time.  Well, in my case it didn't work at all, even when I created that "special brush".  

My sweet little old Flash, I love you so much!  :)

Step by step.

First couple of scenes were the longest to make.  I reshoot them many times till I got the result I wanted.  For those "landscape" scenes it was all about light and shadows.  Those scenes I'm doing right now are smaller but trickier, with slow movements of minifigures.  Hard to make it all smooth sometimes.  I know what to do and how it should look (all those ease in - ease out tricks etc), but minifigures themselves limit me a bit, just the way they can and cannot move.  It's so unlike Flash animation, where I could do whatever I wanted with the characters I drew.   Any way, it's fun and challenging, just takes lots of time :)

Stop Motion Studio update

They did it!  This cool little app was updated recently.  Now Android version has all camera control tools you may need - WB and such.  Give it a try if you prefer to use your phone camera for stop motion animation!  It's available from Google Play or Cateater site.

Just a side note: modern phone cameras have native 16:9.  Why DSLRs do not?..  Funny.  Especially 'cause if DSLR has video feature - it's 16:9.  But photos are good old 4:3.  I will either have to crop all photos or make my movie 4:3.  Oh well :)

Hardware update

Guess I never mentioned that I upgraded my setup. Finally! :)

New camera.  It replaced my outdated D40 with a newer D5300.  Love this little camera!  Live view is awesome and helps a lot.  It works fine with half-unscrewed lens (I'll explain later), except the actual picture is lighter then what you see in live view mode.  I normally take 2-3 test photos any way, to see how the light setup works on shiny LEGO bricks, adjusting small things here and there, so not a big deal.  Live view eats up battery pretty fast, but it gives me enough time to shoot a scene or two.

Still here - 2 :)

I'm here, I'm working :)  Just not much to write about.

Done with many tests and a lot of small stuff these days.  

Actually it's more difficult to find THE software and figure out how to do this or that with it (and if it can do what you need to do), then actually shoot or whatever you are doing - drawing, composing music, or making stop motion animation.  Maybe it's just me, it takes me a while to familiarize myself with any new software.  Especially if I do not use it often enough.  

Any way, today I needed to make "view through binoculars".  Of course I felt "lost" looking at GIMP, so I gave up and opened my good old Flash CS (I bought the last box version of it a while ago, before they switched to subscription bs).  Poor thing had hard time working with large size of my picture (matching photos), but got the work done.  Hurray, one step closer to the final! :)