Bare with me, there is a reason for posting...

[DaveT]

Friday on my mind this week at AFTRS was an interview with Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs who were presenting their new feature Mary and Max.

http://www.maryandmax.com/

Amazing stop motion type animation.
Kinda different from your insanely popular Wallace and Grommet type fare though.
Bit dark, in a good way.

Little bit surreal, and very grown up.
It’s sophisticated in concept but almost naive in style.

So why am I posting here?
Apart from getting sum buzz up for an Ozzie feature?
Mary and Max are shot with digital Canon stills cameras that feed into a central server.

This is pretty much what I was banging on about when I posted this item...

Really beautiful images, and it looks like they used some decent Canon glass to shoot the amazing monochromatic sets.
Lot’s of texture, and all the effects were shot ‘in camera.’
Adam Elliot said in the interview before the feature was presented, ‘people like to see the finger prints.’

 

[Dan Hudgins]

Canon for stop motion

Canon for stop motion

shot with digital Canon stills cameras that feed into a central server.

We have a Cannon XTi on our "Oxberry 35mm" scanner (converted optical printer). It was very simple to hook up, to trigger the camera you use a stereo sub-mini connector to two 5V relays, the relays are driven from my program DANCINES.EXE (tm) which also runs the AC stepper motor on the Oxberry projector via a 120VAC solid state relay.

To connect to the computer full of harddrives we use about 20 feet of USB cables plugged together. It seems you are not to use such long cables but it did not seem to hurt the data.

The Canon XTi is set to shoot RAW and not to save to internal memory, the camera image download program on the camera's CD is loaded and run on the computer with big harddrives, you give the image download program an output folder to save the images into.

Thats it, everytime the scanner program running on a junk computer triggers the camera it shoots a frame and that frame downloads to the harddrive so we can scan 2000' maybe if we need to.

It would work just as well for time lapse or stop or go motion work, animation stand work, titles and anything else you would shoot with an animation motor on a 35mm movie camera.

So that frees up your 35mm animation cameras to be turned into film recorders by using my DANCINEL.EXE (tm) and a LCD or CRT monitor :cute: