Narrative part 2

So Colby and I wanted to collaborate this week and make a stop animation short and knew right away we wanted to work with lego. Our goal was to make a cheesy AWESOME action movie!!

First day we got together with a couple lego sets we bought, one of them being a pirate set and the other Indiana Jones. And I gotta say it was really fun building lego again, it has been a very very long time!! So after we got everything set up we started shooting one of our scenes so we could kinda do a trial so we would be prepared for the next day. Which I am glad we did because we ran into a couple glitches, but after some problem solving we got everything figured out and we knew exactly what we had to do for the shooting day. Our goal was to shoot everything on a green screen ( blue sheet over a cardboard box) and then impose various nature scenes to make our back drops. So after a couple video tutorials and experimenting with a couple of different methods to get the footage into final cut we were ready to start our big shoot!

After we got all the technical stuff figured out, it was pretty easy to do the shoot and it went really smoothly. We went into the shoot with a pretty vague storyboard so we could allow a little spontaneity and because of that we were able to create a couple new scenes. I am really happy with how all the footage turned out and after seeing the final product I am stoked on how well we did at our first attempt. But the best thing that came out of it was the insane learning curve we went through, we learned so much from this project so if we ever do another stop animation it will be 10x better!!

The next stage was the editing which was actually quite easy since we had imported all the scenes as one consolidated clip into final cut. When we uploaded the photos from the camera we threw them into imovie and did a quick job there so when it got to final cut it was a painless process ( other than waiting for the video to render!) But we did watch a couple video tutorials to get certain effects we wanted, which was cool because we did some effects while shooting and after the added effects it made our efforts succeed even more than we expected. Then all that was left was to throw in a title, end credits and music.