help with stop motion effect

[Bryan Harvey]

Hi, I've been asked to duplicate the stop motion effect used in this OK GO music video ( around 2:30 into the video is a good place to see it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2fpgpanZAw


I was thinking it may be interesting to shoot it in a way to add motion blur to the effect as well, but for starters I'd be interested to hear how best to achieve this technically on the Scarlet W. We won't need to be moving the camera on a dolly, but curious to know camera settings etc... to accomplish this.

Thanks for any ideas or insight you may have!

 

[William Dempsey]

Kinestasis and RED

Kinestasis and RED

Hi,

This suggestion may be too late to be useful, but in case it isn't, I would suggest you use the intervalometer function on the RED. Go to Settings, Recording, Mode. Then in place of (continuous recording) set the camera to (internal Timelapse Timer). Set the interval to whatever is comfortable for the effect you want to produce. I would suggest between 1 and 3 seconds.

I used to do a lot of kinestasis style work many years ago with a film camera, and found that using a stop motion-animation motor/ timer combo worked best as opposed to manually triggering frames. RED has this as a built in feature. You set up a regular beat that works well for the effect you want to achieve , and the actor can sync themselves to that beat fairly easily. The RED cameras can even make a noise when the camera is taking a frame which helps for this. If you are at a distance, you can call out the beat. The actor moves between these beats, or in some cases during the beat with a long enough exposure time to get a blur, if that is what you are after. For some effects just having your subject moving very very slowly produces the right effect.

The effect in the music video with the sliding feet is relatively simple with this camera setting.

Additional good samples of this sort of stuff are the works of Mike Jittlov and Norman Mclaren if you want to see some additional ideas. These are the guys who got me into kinestasis back in the 1970's.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ1Hz_iRvIY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aSowDUUaY

Hope some of this is useful,

Bill Dempsey