Setting up the Stage

Before starting the animation, we had to set up the lighting, camera and files on the computer for Dragonframe to automatically save to. We have been keeping the stage in the specialist blacked out room specifically dedicated to stop motion animation, which Grace has been working on gradually over the past month. Moving the stage was easy because all of the wood is attached together, and it fits in the filming booth quite well; however the lights provided in each booth are attached as one mechanism so we were unable to use all of them to light our set.

However we were able to detach one of them to hang over the top of our stage, since we felt it should be brightly lit up with the impression of special effects being used - just like a real concert. Despite this, even with the lights Grace acquired to line the top and bottom of the stage and the LED combined, the image still wasn't bright enough. In the end we used the generic light that hangs above every station and what is used to light up most rooms in the university. We believe this creates a good atmosphere and creates good shadows as well as makes the characters visible.

We decided using my own Canon DSLR 1100D camera and tripod would be best, since I can bring them to the set in the classroom whenever I'm planning to go in and we can get started quicker rather than going at certain times to book out the equipment every day. My camera usually takes good quality photos and we can export the animation we make into image sequences with the right image size so that David can go over it with the drawn animation.

Now that everything is in place and we have a folder dedicated to this project on the university computer, we can start animating!