Quite a productive day today.
21 seconds down...many more to go.
When I started this morning I found that the camera had moved. Minor crisis. The film is one long continuous shot so any camera movement will stand out. Luckily I had taped the tripod down enough to minimize the amount of movement so it was easy to re-align.
I'm going to try and get a better angle for these videos but because of the brightness of the set it's hard for the webcam to see the puppets front on.
Did the first bit of string animation today...I forsee future posts about how stupid it was to try and do string in camera.
The string itself is fairly simple. I tested a few ideas out first and these three were the most successful. The top one is normal parcel string with beading wire doubled up and wrapped around it. It's black because that's what I had lying around. It definitely looks the best and although it could be manipulated it couldn't hold it's own weight so could've caused trouble. The bottom one is 4 lengths of aluminium wire twisted together and then I also tried some heat shrink tubing on it to see how it would look. It is very strong and it holds its own weight but it's also quite stiff and I need the string to move fluidly. The middle one is a plastic type string, like a washing line, with 1mm aluminium wire wrapped around it. It mostly holds its own weight and is fairly strong, but it's the easiest to keep looking fluid so it was the winner.
This is the same orange plastic string with a slightly smaller 0.8mm copper wire wrapped around it. It's then been primed and sprayed red. The paint also helps to give it some rigidity, although it tends to flake off onto the set and puppets which is annoying.
