Before you could even click your fingers at how fast time flies, it was time to produce a golly gosh darned animation!
I was feeling nervous, but the important thing was just getting on with it and seeing it through.
First off, though:
Set-Up and Testing
To shoot the animation, I set up in my room where there was plenty of room for equipment. I placed the background on a large circular desk, and then set up the lights. I used two soft boxes, both extended to about 75% of their maximum height and tilted at around a 45 degree angle downwards. I then flicked three of the five switches on for both lights, giving a strong but even light to the piece.
I then set up a C-Stand with my camera (a Canon 700D) screwed to the end, so that it hung over the animation for a perfect framing. I weighed down the lights and C-Stand with sandbags. I also set up an external display screen attached to the C-Stand and pointing away from the lights, to make it a lot easier to monitor how the picture was looking.
Everything seemed set up to make something good, that was until...
The Shoot
So everything divebombed pretty quickly. It turned out that every time I took a shot with the camera, no matter how careful I was, the pressure of me pressing the button threw the camera just a little off frame. I struggled for a while with this, but without a remote (which I had failed to consider I might need), it soon became clear that getting any kind of consistent framing for a shoot featuring movement as complex as I had planned would be impossible. As with any production, compromise quickly became the word of the day. In the end I shot far less photos than I had hoped to, but figured it would be enough to at least create a narrative with.
To finish with something more appealing than some text, here's a picture of the background and character models sat on the table:
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