Once you've mastered these techniques, however, you'll be able to bring almost any object to life in any setting imaginable.My 11-year-old son, Louis, has spent a lot of this wet summer making stop-motion animation movies with Plasticine and a digital camera.
Some of these elements can be manipulated in the software, while others require trial and error behind the camera. With both effects, there are many variables to control (matching the lighting of your shot to the background, making sure that the pacing of your stop motion remains consistent). We then dropped in a desert island background to turn Pleo into a castaway. Next, I imported the video into Vegas 8, opened the chroma key tool and adjusted the thresholds until the green disappeared from the background. For our film, we raided my son's toy bin again for Pleo the robot dinosaur and shot it moving around against our green backdrop. Apple's Final Cut Express ($199) for the Mac requires a plug-in.Ĭhroma keying is an easy way to give movies a setting that would otherwise be expensive or impossible (the North Pole, outer space).
Both professional and amateur versions of Sony Vegas and Adobe Premiere software have built-in chroma-key capability-Pinnacle Studio Ultimate 11 ($129) actually comes with a green screen in the box. Chroma keying lets you film against a blue or green screen, then drop in a background later on a computer.
This effect is a longtime standard tool of movie and television production, used in everything from weather reports to action sequences. Our second film project focused on chroma keying. Check before you buy.) The result was a comic take on a public service announcement. (Some video-editing programs don't include audio editing.
Once I had used Vegas to render the image sequence, I added a voice-over highlighting the hazards of the road. Free programs such as GBTimelapse and StopMotion Station specialize in stop motion, and some entry-level software, such as Adobe Premiere Elements 4 ($100), will help you monitor the image sequence as you shoot, ghosting each previous image to help you set up the next one.
No matter what camera you use, it is important to keep it steady during the process-we used a Bogen tripod.įor video editing, I uploaded my image sequence to my PC and used Sony Vegas Pro 8 ($549) editing software, but there are many other options. The smaller the movements, the smoother the motion in the finished movie. The principle is simple: Shoot a frame, then move your subject slightly, shoot another frame and so on. In fact, for stop-motion filmmaking, you don't even need a camcorder at all a still camera or even a webcam can be used to capture frame sequences. Any camcorder that is capable of shooting individual frames will do. We lit the scene with household desk lamps and filmed with a Sony hi-def camcorder. We created a 3-minute-long epic of a crash-test-dummy action figure getting hit by a car (I worked the camera, Jamie and Kayla moved our subjects, Joshua supplied the toys). Our first film shoot was an experiment in stop motion. The resulting mini film festival highlights some useful video effects-stop-motion animation and green-screen "chroma keying"-that open up a new world of creative possibilities and are surprisingly easy to learn. In the course of a weekend, I assembled a film crew (myself, my friend Jamie, his 9-year-old daughter, Kayla, and my 11-year-old son, Joshua) and used a setup of semipro equipment and software to create two short comedy videos. With a little attention to technique, a home video can be shot on a makeshift set, then fine-tuned in your own computer postproduction studio to create near Hollywood-quality special effects. High-def camcorders and PC video-editing software have made quantum leaps in quality and sophistication compared to what was available only a few years ago.
Amateur video doesn't have to be as unpolished as the name implies.