So I get everything set up, I built a new set of hands for Sophie Swanson, made her a shoe (yes, just one), and did some touch ups on the cat and the lighting. After that I built an outrageous new frame grabbing rig as my new Digital Rebel does not have a live video feed.

Once those tasks were complete I started shooting and after about seven frames in the battery died. Stuff like that really kicks the wind out of you, yesterday I had something similar happen. I was setting up AnimatorDV for my frame grabber and after it had been running for about 10 minuets it would crash my computer (not my main one, an older box for frame grabbing), yesterday I didn't make it past that, I just gave up. But today was a new day and I was going to animate a shot, or two. So I downloaded Monkey Jam (which seems to run nice and stable) and was ready to go, ran through a focus check, nice clean image, and BAM no battery.

Anybody that knows anything about stop-motion knows that you shouldn't be running ANYTHING off a battery, however when I got my new camera I did not realize that it didn't ship with a wall adapter, so I had to order one, and it's in the mail. According to the manual you should be able to shoot 145 high quality photos, or 245 medium shots. For some reason the battery notice on the computer software always shows full, unless you run out, so I guess I'll need to keep track of the shots, I think I'll be shooting this episode at medium quality as 2496x1664 is more then enough resolution.

While I was setting the computer up I found myself wondering how I lived with just one monitor in the past. My frame grabbing computer needs to be portable, but doesn't need much speed so I'm running it on an old box from 2003 with a 15” LCD. But one screen at 1024x768 just doesn't cut it these days. Look how crammed the screen is, way to much information on a screen that is way to small.

An epic battle to the death!

I'm done animating with the Sanyo iD shot, so I got a shiny new Canon Digital Rebel 350D. I'm using an adapter so I can use Nikkor lenses on the EOS body, the easiest adapter to find is a $250 accessory at B&H but I found one that does the same thing for $50 at Adorama, so far everything looks great.

One great thing about using a Canon is they come packaged with remote capture software for free, whereas Nikon forces anyone who wants that functionality to fork over around $100. I also got a little corded remote and I was really happy to discover it could trigger the software's capture function in place of it's own button, I love options. I'll probably post a more detailed report after I shoot a few shots tomorrow.

Well this week sure felt waisted. My plan had been to finish up Sophie's apartment and start shooting, however fate had other plans. I envisioned her apartment to have a corner with a love seat and an end table, the end table needed a telephone and lamp, the script called for the phone and the lamp was needed becouse I needed yellow in the scene to break up the green, so a lamp with a yellow lampshade fit the bill.

I wanted to create a pottery lamp so I figured I would build a potter's wheel form an old motor I had laying around and stick some clay on it and build a great looking lamp, but it was not to be. The motor spun WAY to fast so I hooked it up to a dimmer that I use to control my lights and slowed it down a lot, it was hard getting the speed right and it seemed to be so fast it would fling my clay across the room, or to slow to be useful, on top of that it had way to much wobble to work at the scale I needed.



I recalled seeing a kids potters wheel at a store and figured, "Why should I deal with these problems if I can save myself a lot of trouble for $20?" When I got home I was dismayed to find that ran on batteries but that wasn't much of an obstacle after I wired it to a DC transformer and pugged it in. However, it was even more useless then my home made wheel, it ran mind numbingly slow, and the clay kept sliding off the wheel, I ended up just making the lamp out of Sculpey.



After those failures I decided to move onto the love seat. I had a design picked out (thanks Becka for the help choosing the decor) and built a simple wooded frame. I decided to do this couch a bit differently then a couch I made some time ago for James (more on his house at a later date) and make all the cushions from potter's clay rather then Sculpey becouse I can smooth it with water and it's cheaper. After I made it I baked it in my toaster oven for about half an hour at low heat so I could paint it and move on, or so I thought. I guess you need to let potter's clay air dry, becouse when I pulled it out it was badly cracked, I'm going to have to remove the ruined clay and start over, yeah!



However I did manage to make a nice telephone and lamp, keep in mind the lighting is not finalized, I will need to add a lot of fill light and tone down the brightness of the lamp considerably. Right now it could work nicely in a Film Noir production but that doesn't really fit the mood of Sophie Swanson.

I've been working very hard on the new website, and I think it's time for it to go live! Not everything is done yet--right now, the number one priority is a comment system for you to leave your opinions on these news posts, or any of my films or projects. But if you keep coming back, I'm sure you'll notice all kinds of nice little add ons.

This is my first php site and I am really happy with how it came together. If you have any comments or suggestions, you can email me at Chris@Chris-Boyer.com.