Simply Curious

With the doll finished, I'm now ready to attempt to make an animation of her.  This involves quite a bit of experimenting and learning new things!

The first thing, of course, was to build a 'stage.'  I ended up pulling out a lightbox kit my dad had given me ages ago and discovered it was plenty big enough to use with my Obitsu.  I've got a fairly good setup, if a bit plain, although I'm learning how best to use it for this project with the good old-fashioned 'make changes til it works' approach.  lighting is SO difficult, yet so important with photography.  I know natural sunlight is best but have no interest in adding natural elements to the chaos.  Of course, it's set up in front of a big window so who knows what kind of effect that's having on it?  Now that I've gotten most of the shadows out of the way I may add some props.  

I also have to become a choreographer.  I'm not very good at that, but I'll do my best.  I need to know where I'm going to move her, and how many positions to have her in.  At this point I don't really know how long it will take for her to accomplish each pose, but I'm aiming for 30 seconds to a minute of animation.   I've plotted out a little dance for her to do.  If it's too short I can lengthen it.  I suppose, since she's a 'clockwork doll,'  I can just rerun the sequence again if I need to.

I did a test run earlier, a simple spin, to see how much I need to actually move her in order to get a smooth animation.  The doll has magnets in her feet and has a circular piece of metal that serves as a stand.  In that stand is a small hole.  I'm really not sure why, but it gives me an excellent point of reference.  I drew on the 'stage' (a disused melamine bookshelf) a circle the size of the stand so that I will always know where to put the doll back to keep her in position.  Around that circle I made marks, (hopefully) evenly spaced, so I could line up the hole in the stand with each mark for turns.  I suppose I ought to figure out a way to keep the stand in place so I can rotate her, but this will work for now.  The pencil marks are not visible on the stage.  The full spin appears to take 2 seconds at 24 frames per second.  

I have got SO many photos on my hard drive right now, and I haven't started on the main project yet!