With Great Power, Comes Great Photography
Piece by Piece
Stop-motion is something I'm deeply fascinated by. Something about it is so captivating to me. Maybe its the idea that every frame is worked on individually that does it for me. I've had multiple projects and ideas about stop-motion but this Lego build is the first one to come into fruition.
This video was actually the second version I filmed. The first was much simpler where the pieces appeared and were in place every frame to frame. This version however had the pieces crawl up to the build and form it that way. Sort of like a reverse melting effect. I got the idea by researching a bunch of different Lego builds and tutorials online.
IDEATION
Given that I needed a proper place to film, I turned one of the rooms in my house into a mini studio. I turned off all the lights, pulled down the blinds, and closed all the doors so the room was totally dark. Then, I used a table lamp as my main light source which faced the front of the build. Then used an old spare phone for a secondary light source for the side of the build that also faced the camera. After all that, I needed the following:
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Blue tack to secure the pieces to the table
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Tripods to hold the camera and secondary light
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Remote photography
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Long finger nails to pull the pieces apart
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Patience. LOTS of it
Drafts
There was no real room for drafts. Its either I did it or I didn't. So what I have below is Version 1. Like I said earlier, the pieces just appear in place.
Also a weird thing happened with the lighting. As I went on, the lighting from frame to frame changed. You can see the video gets brighter as it plays. I suspected it was due to my use of autofocus.
When there aren't any pieces present, the focus area shifts. And when more pieces start to appear, the focus shifts again each frame. I turned on manual focus for the final draft but there were points where I still used AF so I could be wrong, in which case I honestly have no idea why the lighting changes so drastically in Version 1.
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Either way, Version 2 doesn't suffer from that so I'll take it as it was just the switch to manual focus that fixes the issue
One thing to note that I think is important: Lego stop motions are filmed in reverse. Meaning that the footage you see of the head getting built is actually me deconstructing it piece by piece and reversing the footage. I learnt that during my research phase. It gives you way more control of each piece!
And the final version is here. I decided the first draft, despite its issues, was a pretty solid attempt. So I upped the difficulty for myself as well as adjusted my mistakes from before.
So in the end, we have a build where the individual Lego pieces 'crawl' up to their individual place. As you can imagine, this took way more time and effort. Twice as long in fact, even though I had virtually the same amount of photos for each!
Pretty happy considering this is my first Lego project. Even more psyched this is my first stop-motion project. Can't wait to delve into it more and in different ways.