Koala Town

Good morning, all!  Well, I just uploaded the first of hopefully many Koala and Snake videos.  By hopefully many I also mean…hopefully those later many will be a lot better.  …Why did I add voices??

Ok, so here’s what I’ve done today.  I spent the past two hours creating a short test animation featuring Koala and Snake moving around and interacting with each other.  Total runtime is only about 8 seconds but I didn’t storyboard it or anything so that’s why.  I was just kind of making it up as I went along and I wanted to test how the new stage worked out.  Also, I discovered a few unfortunate things:

1.  My camera sucks.  Tremendously.  Even in Manual mode it auto-focuses so you’ll definitely notice that right off the bat in the video.  Also, it’s incredibly grainy if you shoot anything past it’s first zoom setting.  It’s a 300 dollar camera but I bought it for 80 off Amazon.  :O No wonder it was on sale.  I doubt I’ll ever have the money for an HD camera so unfortunately, for now, future Koala Town videos will have a weird public access film quality to it.

2.  I really need to work on learning how to make better puppets.  When I was carving the wood for Koala’s feet (that are now Frankenstein’s monster in appearance) I actually kind of realized I enjoy wood carving.  If I had better tools and more wood I could actually probably try my hand at that.  Basically, making puppets makes you want to experiment and make more.  :O Because it’s a ton of fun.  Hopefully, I’ll get to a point where I can make some actually professional looking ones.

3.  I did notice that in the video there’s a lot of areas where I need to insert frames.  Something I’m learning about stop-motion is, and this is probably why it’s so difficult, that you can’t really set up keyframes for the puppets to map a scene out and then go back and do the inbetweens to smooth out the edges.  If you can then I’d love to know the process because right now it feels like I’m flying blind.

So, yeah, right now I have the little tests going on.  There may be some more in the works in the future but, currently, I’m making plans on how the first set will look.  It’ll probably be inside Koala and Snake’s home since that’s just the easiest place to start.  I bought some extra supplies for bigger papier-mache projects so I’ll definitely get started on that this week, either before or sometime after Christmas.  Progress never takes a holiday!

Finally, going back to what I said about the puppets earlier, I’d really love to learn how to make better ones.  I’m finding Koala is a serious pain in the butt to animate since either her head doesn’t move easily or it flops around or her feet get in the way etc etc.

Okay, enough about that.  Real quick, also wanted to add that I watched Peter and the Wolf last night and it was excellent.  The stop motion was very well done and holy crap were those puppets well made and designed.  They did a great job with Peter’s expressions especially.  Here’s the trailer to it: