“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

DUAL SET-UP V SINGLE SET-UP SHOOTING

When animating, it is difficult to judge ones progress. With the hose we also had issues with it moving slightly on its own. The solution to this is to track the animation using software that grabs frames from the camera and sequences them – allowing you to watch it in real-time as it develops as well as what’s known as ‘onion-skinning’ –semi-transparent images are layered on top of each other. The amount of change in the frames allows you to make sure you’re progressing at the speed you intended.

There are various applications that you can use. We settled on Frame Thief as it was the only serious Apple Mac application we could find. At the time Frame Thief could not capture RAW files directly from the DSC so we tried a dual system – this is where you set up a video camera next to the DSC. This allows you to get a pretty good idea of what the animation is looking like, but the frame is different, so you cannot be sure the puppet is actually in frame. It also required us to shoot first with the video camera, then the DSC, which was time-consuming and there was always the danger making a mistake and not capturing the DSC frame. While we were shooting we started to hear rumors of a new Tim Burton film that was also being shot using DSCs. What they did that was really smart was to attach a lipstick camera to the viewfinder of the Camera, so the reference file would look exactly like the final frame.

The best animation in the film was captured using a dual system – the basement scenes. If you watch the entire sequence you can clearly see how much better we got as we progressed. The first two or three shots are noticeably more jittery than the later fight scenes. This was definitely as a result of getting better at dealing with the dual system. It also helped us once we got out the basement as we had learnt what we could and could not do with the Hose. How much to move it and how much tolerance it would give you. This was important because the dual system did not work for us outdoors.

When you’re shooting in natural light you’ll notice that the sun moves at a remarkable pace. Having a cumbersome extra few steps to shoot just was not practical for us. We moved at a blistering pace outside, sometimes shooting as much as two minutes of animation in a morning, which is unheard of in stop-frame animation (Tim Burton’s crew were moving at 2 minutes a week and there were lot more of them than us!)