Today is a rather exciting day for me. In order to proceed with my plant stop motion project, it was necessary for me to order various bits of equipment and other supplies. The first little tests assignment I’ve given myself is to build a plastic model kit of a Browning 50 caliber machine gun.

That model has shown up in the mail. I also had to go rooting through the storage box to find my old airbrush. I saved up money from a summer job back in the early 1980s to buy this airbrush. And it still works. However, I haven’t used it since the early 1980s. For those of you who don’t know how and airbrush operates a rather simple procedure. The airbrush has little reservoir that holds your paints and it connects to an air hose on one end and the other end of the hose connects to an air compressor. Luckily for me I already own the compressor that I had used in the past for my nail gun. However, the nail gun adapter was much larger than my teeny-weeny airbrush. So I had to figure out what type of adapter I needed, then order that as well. That has arrived, and so has some specially formulated lacquer paints designed to replicate gunmetal. So it seems as if everything is in place to start my first little test.

I picked the 50 caliber machine gun for very good reason. As you can see in the pictures below, I’ve already done extensive work in 3D with this type of weapon. So I’m interested to see if I will be able to port my skills over from 3D to this real world of tangible model making.

In my hand are 2 bottles of paint that, if used correctly should make my model look like metal. We'll have to see if it works.

Here you can see what I normally do, I feel comfortable with this medium. Never to late to try something new.

The Brownie an inexpensive camera made by Eastman Kodak. This was my Mums.

Okay, so today I would like to talk about cameras. My history with cameras is bittersweet. When I was around 11 years old, I was fortunate enough to be able to take an after-school program with somebody from the national film Board of Canada. ( I say somebody, because I cannot remember anything about the person. Come on, it was over 35 years ago)

That was my first hands-on experience with animation, film, and a motion film camera. I was spoiled, for it was a high-quality 16mm motion film camera. I was naive and thought that is how movie cameras worked and looked.

A few years later when I was in high school I saved up money from my summer job and purchased a brand-new super eight film camera.

If any of you have seen the film by that name, “Super 8”, directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. Well that is very reminiscent of my youth. Although I was not attempting to make live-action films, I was more interested in stop motion animation.

I still remember picking up the camera, then heading downtown to purchase the film, because it was not common item. I then painstakingly shot my first stop motion film with some G.I. Joe's that I had kicking around. The 12 inch ones, not these small little things that are available now. Then I had to mail the film all the way to California for processing. About 6 to 8 weeks later, the film was mailed back to me. You have no idea how excited I was, I could hardly contain myself. I pulled out my cheap little super 8 movie projectors that I bought from a pawnshop, and proceeded to screen my very first production.

This is not my original Super 8. I lost that camera some how. I found this baby at a yard sale. $5.

No batteries needed, this camera operated by spring power. You cranked it up with this handle.

My jaw dropped, and not in a good way. I was devastated, utterly devastated. The film that I had purchased and sent away to be processed was approximately 3 min. Long. It cost me approximately $30 plus postage. Keep in mind we are talking the mid-80s. So that was a considerable amount of money for me back then.

I felt it was completely wasted. What went wrong, you ask? Well, the film was out of focus. You see these cameras, as cool as they were in their day, did not have anything automatic about them. You had to manually focus based on physical distance between the camera and your subject. Which meant you needed to tape measure. These cameras worked really well when shooting subjects further away like home movies where people were 10 or more feet away from the camera. I had been shooting only a couple feet away, on a macro setting. This I learned the hard way was a lot harder to do. So anyway, I bought some more film and tried again, and again, and again.

I was able to get the films in focus, but the quality never looked good. I had been spoiled when I use that 16mm film camera. I naively thought my super eight movie camera was going to be just as good.

My 16 mm film canister. This was my first animated 16mm film.

I gave up and within a couple years. I went to Sheridan college where we use professional 16mm movie cameras. After Sheridan I went to Ryerson and studied film and photography were once again I was exposed to high quality film cameras, and we had an in-house lab that processed the film for us. ( black and white only, but is film students black and white made us feel cool)

video cameras had been on the market for a while, but they were completely useless for stop motion animation. They were unable to record single frames at the time.

This is my first 16 mm animated film. The first part is the Film Negative then a Reversal was made of the negative. It was then scanned and copied to 1 inch video tape for editing. The whole proses was slow and expensive.

Unlike digital, one can actually see the frames on a film strip. In the good old days we would slice the film with a razor blade to make edits, then pastes the cut strips back together.

when I left film school and got involved with the film and television industry. Most of the work that I created was scanned and transferred to 35mm film stock or Digital Betacam. Both of these technologies were far too expensive for me to work with at home, on my own projects.

So I more or less had resigned myself to the fact that I probably would never get back into stop motion animation.

This is my 35mm film slr. It was my Dad's camera. I used it a lot while at Ryerson. Now, not some much. Nothing is automatic with this camera, no auto focus, nothing, you needed to meter the light and set aperture etc manually. Pain in the butt if truth be told. However a great way to learn photography.

Then the DSLR revolution happened. I've had a SLR camera for years. An old Pentax Spotmatic. But I would never have dreamed of using it for stop motion animation, it would have been far too expensive to shoot on that type of film. Plus, there was no easy way to work with it once it was developed.

But the DSLS opened up whole new world, and I almost missed it.

I never really paid a lot of attention to the possibilities these new cameras offer, yes we had one in the house. It was used mainly as the family camera for photographing birthdays and dance recitals, etc.

However, several years ago I had an opportunity to work in a stop motion studio.

Cuppa Coffee Studios.

http://www.cuppacoffee.com

This is my DSLR. Bought specifically for filming HD video. I love this camera. It has opened up so many new possibilities.

This was not the typical type of studio that I usually worked in. Over the last 20 years. I primarily worked in 3-D computer-generated animation. However, they needed some 3-D and digital compositors to work on a stop motion television series called Glenn Martin, DDS. Though I only worked there for a little over a month. ( short contracts are not unusual in the film and television industry) in that short period of time, I was able to see an awful lot of what was going on. I was really impressed, they had over 50 little studio set up each with a DSLR camera. The frames were tethered to a computer and sent straight up to the Digital department where I was working. Remember my story about 6 to 8 weeks waiting for film to be developed and shipped back to me. Here the animators could shoot a scene and send it straight to me as soon as they had completed. I was also blown away by the quality of the imagery these cameras were capturing. They were not shooting in the HD video mode. They were shooting stills at the highest setting much larger than the standard HD frame size, which is 1920 x 1080. I cannot remember the exact frame size but was well above 4000 pixels or 4K. So for me working with these incredibly high resolution images, was a pleasure. That whole experience stuck in my mind. I wasn't ready to go home and start making stop motion film, nor was I ready to spend a couple thousand dollars on a good DSLR camera.

Now let's move ahead a couple years, and a client of mine, that I normally did animation for requested I shoot some video. Groan. I hate shooting video, or at least I did. I have owned many video cameras in the past. A VHS camera, a high 8 video camera, a Super VHS video camera, a DV video camera, and of even rented a digital Betacam. Yet, I've have never been satisfied with the way the video looked. I've felt like I've wasted my money on all those cameras struggling to make something look decent.

So around 2008 I decided that I'd would give up working with video. It was just not for me. I hated it.

However, when this client of mine requested that I shoot some video I did a little research and discovered this whole DSLR video revolution, and what was even cooler, was that a decent camera was not that far out of range for me. I bought a Canon in 60D, then I purchased a whole bunch of bits and pieces to augment the camera so it was more suitable for video work. Things like microphone, a follow focus, a set of rails to hold the follow focus, the cage to keep the camera safe and attach other little goodies, a shoulder mount, some handle grips and the map box.

I've never tallied up the final cost for all this, but it still came in at a reasonable cost considering the quality of the footage I was able to get.

So I shot a few videos, delivered them to the clients, got paid. So that was that.

The first project actually cover the cost of all the equipment. I now owned free and clear a decent camera, tripods, light stands, lights and various other the production equipment.

It was more or less sitting idle in the studio.

Then one day I was reminiscing about the good old days, this was triggered when my 10-year-old daughter Audrey, produced a stop motion film with our iPad.

I was blown away, and inspired as well. She reminded me of what this was all about, why I got into this in the first place. Audrey produced a short little film about Smurfs. Complete with a hand-drawn set and lots of tiny little props that she made on her own. It was just like when I was a young child except, and this is one big exception, she was not plagued with horrid image quality. Nor was she forced to wait two months to see the fruits of her labor. She could take 20 or 30 stills and then play them back right away. Taking it even further, Audrey on her own, discovered how to import her stop motion footage into iMovie and then import music. This child was light years ahead of me. I almost felt a little bit embarrassed even slightly threatened. I had spent the last 30 years making excuses for why I wasn't making stop motion films anymore, “ It's those bloody cameras, nothing but crap” I would always say. Now I can't say that anymore, if a goofy device like an iPad can shoot and cobble together a better looking short film than any video camera, maybe my DSLR camera could do the same.

With a 16 GB card in my DSLR, I can record almost 20 minutes of 1920x1080 HD video. Very cool.

I have no more excuses, I have the camera, and even if I didn't own that Canon, there would be no reason why I couldn't shoot a decent film with any regular off-the-shelf digital camera. Heck, before we had this fantasy Canon, (which is not one of the high-end models by the way) We owned a cheaper camera. A basic point-and-shoot, I think it was eight megapixels. It would've been just fine for my purposes.

I'll even take it one step further, I have a new iPhone, no, not the iPhone 5. The camera on that's is incredible. If I didn't own a camera I could shoot stop motion film with my iPhone.

So there you have it, a little bit of my history with cameras, later on in a separate post, I will get into the finer details of my camera equipment and how I have set it up to use in my stopped frame studio.

I will also do a fairly detailed post regarding pipeline, which basically means work flow. Going from camera to computer and then on out into the world.

I hope this has been helpful don't hesitate to ask me any questions.

Until next time,

Robert Waterworth