Sorry, gang, it's been awhile.
I fell behind on getting episodes of Season 2 of "The Simplest Things" out because I had written two episodes with dinosaurs. I can't make CG dinos myself and even if I could, they wouldn't fit the campy, retro comedic tone of the show. So, I wanted to do stop motion. I finally decided I was never going to get the block of time I needed to do the stop motion the way I wanted, so I'd have to come up with something new.
What I decided to do was this:
Shoot the T-Rex frames in front of a blue screen (can't use green because the model I was using was green) I had done the Triceratops in front of blue on a miniature set and left the blue in as sky. He only walked a few steps, so that was no problem. For the T-Rex, he is running after our alien Pratt and the miniature simply wasn't large enough to give him much room to run. I had to come up with something else.
I decided to have the dino "run in place" and move the background in post. So, I found a background with no obvious indicators of the modern world,. blew it up to 6x its size and slowly shrunk it behind the frames of our dinosaur running. Our live action character also ran in place in front of a green screen and was keyed in on top of everything else, so the two seem to run at the same speed.
Another time saver I used, that will look obvious once you know about it was looping the frames. I did my best to animate only a half dozen or so frames full circle so that in a second or two the dinosaur would shake his head or throw his legs back and forth. He is running after all.
These techniques all saved some time, but in the end 14 seconds of running still took about 2 hours to get to the small screen.
I fell behind on getting episodes of Season 2 of "The Simplest Things" out because I had written two episodes with dinosaurs. I can't make CG dinos myself and even if I could, they wouldn't fit the campy, retro comedic tone of the show. So, I wanted to do stop motion. I finally decided I was never going to get the block of time I needed to do the stop motion the way I wanted, so I'd have to come up with something new.
What I decided to do was this:
Shoot the T-Rex frames in front of a blue screen (can't use green because the model I was using was green) I had done the Triceratops in front of blue on a miniature set and left the blue in as sky. He only walked a few steps, so that was no problem. For the T-Rex, he is running after our alien Pratt and the miniature simply wasn't large enough to give him much room to run. I had to come up with something else.
I decided to have the dino "run in place" and move the background in post. So, I found a background with no obvious indicators of the modern world,. blew it up to 6x its size and slowly shrunk it behind the frames of our dinosaur running. Our live action character also ran in place in front of a green screen and was keyed in on top of everything else, so the two seem to run at the same speed.
Another time saver I used, that will look obvious once you know about it was looping the frames. I did my best to animate only a half dozen or so frames full circle so that in a second or two the dinosaur would shake his head or throw his legs back and forth. He is running after all.
These techniques all saved some time, but in the end 14 seconds of running still took about 2 hours to get to the small screen.
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