A few weeks ago we made a stop motion movie of our the 2-in-1 Pocket Lens coming out of it's box getting assembled and then getting onto a phone. After which the Flexible Tripod came along and dangerously swung the whole thing around only to disappear shortly after.
You can watch the video here.
To make the video was actually quite easy and we should we'd share a brief overview of how we did it.
Equipment:
1. AmazonBasics Photography Light box
You can essentially use any stable light source, we had this one and it was really practical. Especially because we could put the phone that was capturing the images on top and didn't need any fancy system to keep the phone stable. You can see it here.
2. Stop Motion Studio app
This application costs about $5 on the AppStore and works on an iPad, there is a free companion app that you set-up on your iPhone which makes it great to manage. Basically you don't need to touch the phone as you can manage the camera remotely from the iPad.
To make things faster we had it set on a timer to take a shot every 5 or 10 seconds so we didn't need to press. This puts a bit of pressure and doesn't always work. You can get the app here.
3. An iPhone
We used the iPhone as the camera placed on top of the Amazon Lightbox.
4. An iPad
With the iPad we managed everything and then exported the film.
And that was that.
On the script, we didn't really script it but let the ideas come as we were making it. This was totally improvised. But we were happy to see we managed to inspire Olloclip to make a similar stop-motion video of their own.
Some details:
Number of images taken: 204
Time to shoot: Approximately 2h
Lessons learned:
1. We had the camera set on auto adjust for the white balance and lighting, we should have kept it fixed. It does give a cool "halo" or spotlight effect on the product but it also makes the lighting sort of "flicker" which isn't cool.
2. Some moments we wanted the movie to "pause" on a single frame but didn't realize that one should just shoot 4-5 or more images instead of needing to edit afterwards.
3. It's good to have a plan.