This time it’s just a mechanical suit of armor that grows out of a magic boombox which is playing The Trout’s greatest hits, giving Brett amazing powers.

Won’t make sense until you see the final sequence.

And maybe not even then…

Here’s some shots:

Click this one to view full res

Something I’m working on for the Freak Alley Sequence…

This hasn’t been texture mapped yet… Just rendered with Ambient Occlusion…

Last Saturday I persuaded a bunch of my friends to come help me shoot an action sequence in freak alley. This differed from other action sequences I’ve shot in alleys in the past, in that it was during the day and I shot the entire sequence on a Canon D60 still camera.

I shot the whole thing using a stop motion, limited (about 6 fps) animation technique. And take it from the guys (and gal), it is pretty tough to act (or punch, or kick, or steal a purse) when you move frame by frame.

The results turned out pretty good. The action is stroby, awkward, and different. And it looks cool…

Punch from johndanielsmith on Vimeo.

Here are some color graded still frames from the sequence:

I’ve decided to use an old stage technique to create waves for the trout sequence. I drew a single repeating wave shape in illustrator, imported it into AE, animated it, and then duplicated it in Z space. When the animation is offset and each wave is given a slightly different shade of blue, it creates an interesting wave motion.

Check it out:

Waves from johndanielsmith on Vimeo.

Stars burn and therefore so should Star Man. So I studied up on creating fireballs. With the help of some internet videos I was able to come up with exactly what I needed.

1. You take a piece of fabric (cotton works well) and roll it up into a ball.

2. Then you stitch and wrap it with thread.

3. Then you soak it with lighter fluid. (but not too much!)

4. Light it up and watch it burn!

I tried shooting the fireball with a Canon 20D on burst mode (about 12 fps) and it came out looking pretty cool.

I also shot it on a JVC GY200 at 24p and here’s a clip from that video:

Fireballs from johndanielsmith on Vimeo.

Compositing the flame onto Star Man is a cinch in After Effects. Set the blend mode to add and do a little motion tracking and you get great results…

This handy tool is going to help me bring the Trout to life… It came out with AE CS3 and is a lot of fun to play with. It creates a deformation mesh on a 2D image based on its alpha channel. By placing and animating the position of pins/pivots you can create some interesting results:

AE CS3 Puppet Tool from johndanielsmith on Vimeo.

The Trout is a character that kind of sings the world into existence. I’ve had a lot of fun designing him and prepping for animation.

Here’s some process sketches:

Here’s the finished result out of photoshop:

I plan to animate him using the puppet tool that came out in After Effects CS3. I’ll post something on that soon.

I was looking for a liquid that would have a slow, smooth, methodical flow for the river sequence and my wife suggested Karo Syrup. With a little blue food coloring it was looking perfect and tasting great!

As you can see it took quite a bit to get the job done…

Interesting results:

River Flow from johndanielsmith on Vimeo.

I guess I didn’t get enough of claymation yet… Here we go again -

Star Man starts the whole friendship bridge sequence. His teardrop falls to the ground and morphs into the landscape.

I created Starman out of Crayola Air Dry clay. He was a lot of fun to animate.

I wanted to maximize the coverage of the claymation landscape sequence. So I setup two cameras. The first camera was locked as normal to a sturdy Bogen tripod. The second camera needed to be an above angle shot and I didnt have the right gear to get the angle I needed. So I took the tripod head and stem off and gaff taped them to a C-Stand. This gave me the angle I needed.

But it wasn’t the most stable thing ever. And keeping track of animation, camera angles, etc for 9 hours is a little bit to much multitasking for me. So when I played the above angle sequence back, I got this:

To try and fix it, I used Mocha AE to track the footage and hopefully stabilize it. It kind of worked… But I ended up having to alter by hand every frame in the sequence, rotation, position, and scale. And then I rotoscoped the whole sequence frame by frame in photoshop. Fun stuff…

Here is the result:

So if you’re shooting stop motion - lock the camera down!