Final Cut Pro - Adding Audio and the crossfade effect

An effect that is usually needed within a stop motion is audio, in this case music. Music can be put into a stop motion to create a certain atmosphere, it could be humour or something more sinister.

 The music can be from your ipod or CD's, this allows you to add your own personality to a video if the same one is being used by someone else.

To add music it is just the same as adding the images, you find the song that you want, highlight it then drag it onto the final cut program. Once it has appeared on the sidebar drag it into the time and it should appear their.

The audio itself should appear in the line marked 'A' standing for audio. If it doesn't appear in here then the audio will not work and it could ruin your stop motion piece.

In some cases in stop motion you want to add effects to the music to make it louder or quieter, for me i needed to make the music quieter so another sound effect can be heard. The effect that i would need to use would be crossfade, this will allow me to make the music quieter.

To add crossfade to a piece of audio you first have to select the part that you want to go quieter:

 

Right click the highlighted area and options should pop up on the screen, the option that is need is transition 'crossfade' or in this case 'cross dissolve'.

This will then make the audio quieter at the point you have chosen.

Using Final Cut Pro Cont'd

When the images are on the timeline you are most likely going to need change the speed of the pictures to make them flow better and smoother.

To make it much easier to change the speed you can nest items,this allows you to put all the images together into one sequence so to speak.

It will allow you to change the speeds of all the pictures at once instead of having to change them individually, it is much easier this way.

You can change the name of the sequence to the title of your stop motion perhaps?

To change the speed of your stop motion you right click the sequence in the time and a variety of option will appear, the option you want is 'speed'.

Once speed has been selected you can then change the speed of the whole sequence, for my image for example because it was rather slow i set the speed at around 6000. It looked like it was fine, but 7 seconds isn't really that long, i would probably slow it down to make it longer but if i do that then it will become more jumpy. These are some factors to take into consideration when setting the speed of an image.

Using Final Cut Pro

When creating a stop motion video the software you most likely will be using is final cut pro. This is a program that you can use to create  stop motion and add effects to the pictures you have taken, it could be music/sound effects, visual effects and so on.


To view the pictures you first have to open a new sequence, this will then come up with a blank screen for you to put your pictures on.

However to get your images actually onto the program you have to open the actual file and put it onto the program. If you have all the pictures in one file you drag the folder on, it is much easier that way.




To get the images into the program, first highlight the images in your chosen folder and then drag them into the sidebar.

The images should appear in a sidebar like this, however to get them into one sequence you must nest items to create a sequence.

 To nest the items you first have to drag the images onto the timeline

It should look something like this, you will be able to see the images along this timeline.

The good thing about the timeline is that you are able to add visual and audio effect to the timeline.

Evaluation of photoshoot

In my opinion i think the photo shoot went reasonably well, as a group we came up with a good idea and seem organised when participating with the shoot.

 It wasn't just one person doing something we all pulled together which is always good, if someone had an idea we would take it into consideration and place it in the shoot if necessary.

A weakness of the photo shoot had to be timing, because we were the last group to go we had to come up with an idea and act on that in a very short space of time, this could build up stress and mistakes could have been made, luckily their was no mistakes.

If we had more time then we could have had more photos and a much better sequence in my opinion.

 

If we had to do the photo shoot again i would probably try and have more realistic clouds, so instead of paper they could be wool or something similar, that way it will look kind of realistic.

Another thing would be try and get more photos or have more time, if we had either of them then we could have had a much better image.

Equipment list from photoshoot

Canon 5D

Cambo camera stand

Soft box wafer/Strip light

Sync lead

 Bowens radio trigger

Bowen 500W lighting

24-105mm zoom lens

stop motion contact sheet

Movement within stop motion

To create a more fluid motion within the stop motion, instead of just the person moving we had the background move as well, this was to create the illusion of movement.

 The fan was a group decision, if you were actually to fall through the sky, their would be a slight breeze when coming down, again it was their to create a sense of realism.
 Looking at the pictures you can see the clouds slowing moving down, we did figure out that once the clouds get past the leg then they would be out of shot, this is when we moved them clouds back to the top of the sheet for continuity.

stop motion

For our task we were told to get into groups and create a stop motion in the studio.

Our idea for a stop motion was rather simple, a person falling through the sky with an umbrella, almost like Mary Poppins in a way.

The basic idea for this shot was to have the person not to move, but have the clouds moving down to give the illusion of movement.

To give it tat extra realistic effect we used a fan to blow the hair to make it feel like they would actually be falling.

We had to take into consideration that we were in a studio, it was ours and the camera mans job to not have any white show up in the shot, another thing is that none of the 'crew' show up in the shot either.

The lighting that we used was quite a long rectangular light, this was to project a lot of light onto the person, the main reason this was used was to create realistic lighting in a studio environment.

Oh No Not Stereo - Carnivores (Official Stop-Motion Music Video)

Guy Walks Across America

This is a stop motion video of a man walking across America, the thing that they did good in this was that they got the walking right, because in a stop motion video it has to flow from one picture to the next, this video did that really well.

OK Go - End Love - Official Video

Although this video doesn't continuously use stop motion, in the places that they do use it it looks very good, the fluid motion of the people from one shot to the next is really good.
The way that they move to each other and form as one thing is really good.

iFlip

This is quite a unique way of doing a sop motion video, with the pictures already on the ipod, all he did was go to the start and scroll through the photos to create a very unique piece.