More stop motion

On another boring weekend, I decided to try some more stop motion stuff. This time the plan was some juggling balls. Before starting though, my perfectionist (perhaps obsessive) side shone through and I decided to plot out a proper set of parabolas for the balls to follow and a timing chart. This meant I had to do a bunch of playing around in Octave (Matlab for those not at a university or unwilling (actually unable (bloody mac)) to pirate). This in turn led me to try and sort out the problems I'd been having with making plots with Octave. After reinstalling Octave and Gnuplot, it turns out the answer involved change an environment variable in the .profile file. But that isn't really important for you guys to know. The end result was that I got it all working and wrote a script that would tell me where the balls should be positioned at each frame.

Next came preparing the scene. I decided my floor would be the best place to actually place the balls, since any other surface would involve certain difficulties regarding a force known to some as gravity. I checked that pencil marks could be easily removed from the floor, and then proceeded to mark out the spots that balls would be placed during the video. The last step was to set up the good old tripod and then take 70 odd photos, moving one or two balls in between each photo.

Onto post-production. Importing all the photos onto the computer and then into iPhoto was easy, but then it turns out that iPhoto doesn't have a batch rotate command built in. So I went and found a command line tool that did the job. After the little jaunt on the command line, it was onto iMovie to put it all together, which like this post, was a little tedious.

Now for the end result.


I think for my next stop motion project, I think I'll try for a few more complicated moves and put some gloves in the scene to represent the hands (I just had the idea for the gloves and am quite happy with myself). I might try this on the weekend if I don't go anywhere. (It's a long weekend and I'm not sure if I get paid tomorrow, Monday or Tuesday since payday is Saturday and Monday may or may not be a public holiday. If I have money tomorrow, I may go to Busan for the weekend.)

End Post
Writing time: 21 minutes
Time since last post: less than an hour
Current media: Daria 1x01 Esteemers