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FYI! Last read at 11:39 on 2024/04/29.

PlayMo Nativity #1 (v2)

I got a Playmobil Nativity Set, to have something a little different for Christmas.
Me being...well...me... I decided to have a go at stop motion animation.

This is my first 'proper' animation, so don't expect it to look like an Aardman production!

 

The "plan", by the way, is to do a few of these in the run-up to Christmas. There is no sound, but you might get a giggle if you are a fast reader and you switch on subtitles.

 

Behind the scenes

Some behind the scenes photos.


It's harder than it looks to animate a tracking shot.


Take a photo, move things a tiny bit, take a photo, move...
It's quite time consuming.


Checking the composition, it's all very colourful!


I put a little camera in the stage, so you can see what the PlayMo-people see!

Version 2? [2013/11/10]

Yup. I thought it might have been better with some sort of soundtrack, so I fired up MuseScore and bashed out a few notes. Then, as mom suggested it sounded like a funeral march (the lead instrument is supposed to be a guitar), I went and arpeggio'd the lot so it sounds more like a guitar being strummed. Playback is from the Yamaha PSR e-333 via a MIDI file; recorded into a cassette recorder (!) which is then recorded into the computer. This was done to add a touch of analogue to things. I don't think it is so obvious, maybe I should have left the hiss in the final version? This leads on to Nero Wave Editor which was used to tidy the audio, clip it at the correct places, and to widen the stereo separation a little bit.
On the video side, YouTube kept rejecting quick'n'dirty conversions to MP4 files, so I had to transcode to XviD with AVIDemux. However AVIDemux couldn't handle trying to match a video with a funny frame rate (10fps) to an audio file, it kept crashing. So I used AVIDemux to make the XviD, and then I pasted it all together with VirtualDub. Then YouTube was happy.

What a palaver! If you don't mind, the rest of these animations will be silent!

 

Your comments:

Rob, 11th November 2013, 20:10
Very impressive for a newbie! Tracking shots, and using something as unwieldy as an iPad to boot..! Keep it up :)

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