Sunday 13 September 2009

"The Black Yellow Night" - The Set

The set was very basic, cheap and simple. In true student fashion most of the materials were sought from skips to keep production costs to a minimum. I built the set on blocks of wood so the whole set was raised 4 inches of the table top, this allowed me to have a series of magnets underneath the set floor that would prove essential in pining the models down to minimize unwanted movement. I learned from making my first stop-motion that it's a good idea to glue down and secure anything that can move that shouldn't. When I was filming I was often in very low level lighting and so there was the occasional nearly catastrophic stumble in to the equipment or set. if i hadn't gaffa taped or super-glued down everything from the bed to entire set itself then large chunks of filming would be rendered useless.
The lighting consisted partly of angle-poised lamps and partly of LED's. For the scenes that required low level lighting I used a mini lighting rig made of LED's. I found LED's to give an interesting light to the set and they were also very adaptable in trying to find the right light for each scene.
The final scene of the giant wasp taking flight above the grandpa's bed required me to build a pulley system above the set to hoist the wasp up in small increments at a time. admittedly the pulley idea was last minute and I never planned to have one from the beginning. This meant that the way i built the pulley system was based more on a fast approaching deadline rather than building a pulley a system that best mimicked the movement of a real wasp. in hindsight this should have been better planned but i am still pleased that i managed to get the very heavy model of the wasp to fly in some sort of way.

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