Introduction: Stop-frame Animation Movie From Junkbox Parts!
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About: Every week two geeky people in Rochester MN spend every ounce of their freetime creating educational videos, podcasts, articles, and music. They publish it all on the internet, free to anyone in the whole univ…
Every month, we at the Rabbit Hole Hackerspace in Rochester MN look to Instructables for a build event that gets all of the hackerspace members together for epic project-ry. And this month, the theme was "Creative Reuse". We had just acquired a bunch of boxes of junk parts with unknown pieces of electronics, and we thought, why not make it a journey of a rabbit going through dangerous lands to get to The Rabbit Hole!
To do this, it was a massive collaboration from all of the members in the Rabbit Hole. The idea was to get different members to each do a scene for the rabbit character to go through and do a stop frame movie of that.
To do this, it was a massive collaboration from all of the members in the Rabbit Hole. The idea was to get different members to each do a scene for the rabbit character to go through and do a stop frame movie of that.
- We first needed platforms on which to put our scenes: https://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-diorama-set/ - these were built with scrap wood pieces from the woodshop at the hackerspace.
- After they were spray painted black, each person got a board to make characters on, such as: https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-Card-Soldiers-Out-Of-Old-Pharmacy-Bott/ and https://www.instructables.com/id/Create-War-of-The-Worlds-Inspired-Junkbots/ - Each of the scenes were done by different people with different themes. We had scenes such as robots, LEGO, electronics, snow, even someone's collection of minions from Despicable Me made up a scene!
- We needed to figure out how to keep our camera steady. This required the creation of a dolly that our camera would be fastened to and moved along on: https://www.instructables.com/id/Stop-Motion-Camera-Dolly-From-Re-purposed-Parts/ - This was made with old rollerblade wheels and various welded metal bar stock pieces.
- Now for the pictures: With a little tape measurer trick, we were able to control how much the camera moved with each shot as it followed the rabbit character. For example, we would move the camera 1/8th of an inch along the 8foot scene and take a picture. The dolly also allowed us a little space to put a steak knife in to serve as the indicator.
- Main character: The character was a rabbit! One of our members used 3D software to create walking and running poses for a rabbit character. Another members offered to print the rabbit character on his Makerbot 3d printer. So if you watch the movie close enough, you can see it "walking" :). This meant that every frame that was taken, we had to take the last pose out and put the new pose in. - Any half printed bunnies ended up becoming furniture for the Queen of Heart's scene.
- One of our members brought in some professional light setups to help make the cameras happy and our movie editor worked on getting the clips together with the appropriate sounds! We used Sony Vegas Pro 12 to edit the clips/shots and the sounds were from http://freesound.org.
