We took our green screen from episode 5, a few 7 year-olds, an idea about dragons, knights and princesses, and came up with this movie. We made a storyboard from our imaginations. We built a castle out of cardboard, bought a toy dragon and viola! We were good to go. Stop motion animation, blended with live action has been done in Hollywood for over 100 years. The only difference now is that we can do it in computers; and we don't have to develop film. Our animation and our acting don't have to be the greatest in order for us to have fun. We just have to have an idea and the materials to build stuff and the lights to light stuff. We had a little bit of help to make sure the green screen came together after we found out some of our lighting was messy. But all in all the story comes across in the fact that the princesses still got rescued. Making your own movie with friends is more doable now than ever before. Enjoy!
Pot-O-Problems Challenge Revealed: Godzilla vs Justin Bieber
When we began this movie we had no idea what we were getting into. Our producers wanted everything about this movie to be as unique as possible. We spent half a day in New York City shooting things like Times Square, the Staten Island ferry, Wall Street, and lots and lots of tall buildings. All this footage was for backgrounds.
Once back in our studio, we set up our new green screen and started filming our toy Justin Bieber and our toy Godzilla in stop motion at 15 frames-per-second. One of the most challenging things was getting the Justin Bieber toy doll to look like Justin Bieber. The doll was dated. Justin's haircut is new and different compared to what is on the doll. So we had to give him a haircut. Ever tried shaving hard plastic? Not easy.
Depending on when you see this, our behind-the-scenes look at this whole process is in our members area board in the behind-the-scenes section of our website. This film, between the storyboarding, animation, and the post production took us over 50 hours to complete. It bumped the release of Episode 5 back 2 weeks. Thank you for your patience. Enjoy!
Winter's Tale: The Dolphin with the Prosthetic Tail.
This is an animation we did after we took a family trip to Florida and saw Winter, the dolphin with the artificial tail. This is such an inspiring story. Books have been written about Winter, movies have been made, television specials produced, and now we have seen him with our own eyes. And being who we are, we have added our own stop motion animation to the ongoing adventures of Winter. Enjoy!
Challenge Revealed: Ninja vs Mini Chef Stop Motion Animation
Here is what we came up with when challenged with random items, i.e. an avocado, ninja outfits, a six-year-old, and an ice cream cone. This stop motion animation built upon what we have experimented with in lawn-surfing videos. We had to resort to some After Effects animation for a few of the effects, but mostly this was all shot in camera in one afternoon. We used the aged-film filter in iMovie and the hard light filter too. We wanted it to look like an old kung fu movie. The Japanese subtitles are taken directly from Google translator. We have no idea if they are accurate. We suspect not. If any of you know Japanese, let us know what it actually says.
Challenge Revealed: Unstuck - Animated Wood Guy
Here is our first challenge from the Pot-O-Problems. We were kind of stumped. We tried a lot of different ways to animate these wooden guys. It took trial and error, but we finally figured it out. Look for the Behind-the-scenes on this one. We'll show you how we made it happen. Sometimes the simplest looking animations are the hardest. That was the case here. Enjoy!