and so it begins...

Yesterday I finally managed to finish making bits and pieces for the E4 animation, including the binoculars, which were super fiddly. Seems I only took one photo during the making process, but will take one later of those and the E4 that I made and update it on here...

Setting up was pretty difficult due to the lack of equipment, I had to just use any lamps that I could steal from around the house and set up on the floor in the corner of my room with my camera propped up on some books! It'll do for now. Once I can afford it I'll have to invest in a tripod and some decent lighting, which I'm sure is going to cost a small fortune!...

I used three lights, one on either side of the set and one behind the camera. Ideally one of those would be lighting the background but as it was very small I needed the model to stand really close in front of it so that it would fill the camera so I couldn't fit a light in between the two...

I did a few test shots on Dragon to try and get the exposure right, then did some little bits of animation, which I tried to put up on youtube but they weren't playing properly.

Eventually I did the first part of the animation, I tried rendering it out two different ways as I wasn't entirely sure how I should do it. Here's the first...

I rendered this one out as high resolution jpegs, and as you can see the light flickers really badly. The bulbs in the lights I'm using are energy saving bulbs which are fluorescent and so they flicker constantly, the camera picks up on this and so it's visible in the animation. I'm hoping to put a filter on the animation so this might disguise it a little, but I also think it makes the animation look less smooth.

For this next version I rendered it out as a Video and it seems to have smoothed it out a little so I feel it looks a lot better.

There are still things I'm not too happy with; the reaction/double take he does is really poor, I'm hoping that once I add the mouth on afterwards it will look a little better.