Set up and Shooting Process

My garage stop frame stage consists of a large lighting frame suspended from the ceiling rafters with a 40” x 40” shooting stage below. The lighting frame is really one very large soft light. Composed of ten led strip lights, a reflector and a fabric scrim below. There are an additional number of small lights hung outside of the frame for key and fill lighting. This lighting set up is really good at only one thing, providing very even light on the stage as you would use for a product shot. This is just what is needed for green screen shooting which is what almost all my scenes are. My shooting stage is modular to come apart for any shot and I have three screw driven (manual)tracked camera dollies of different sizes for camera motion. I shoot with a Canon RP camera with a Nikon manual macro 17-50mm zoom lens for most shots controlled through Dragonframe software on PC.

Because nearly all my shots are with the green screen with settings added compositing, I need to finalize at least the main features of my backgrounds before shooting the animation. The perspective and camera angle of each background must be a perfect fit with the camera angle that I use to shoot the puppets and the easiest way to do this is to load frames of all the backgrounds in Dragonframe where I can view both the shooting angle position with the background also visible. So my process is after storyboard to ‘build’ all my virtual backgrounds. Even when I build these as a physical set I make them half scale roughs to my puppets adding detail later in Photoshop. These PSD file contain a variety of elements. They may include some Unity rendered background pieces with photographed textures, paper elements and props, and some photoshop firefly elements too.

The backgrounds often get revised again after shooting but as long as the camera angle, lens focal length and position fit with the existing BG art, it works fine. See examples below.

There is a lot that is changed from the original shoot to final image but having all the shot elements separate allows much more freedom in the final composite.

Note how the character faces are entirely replaced on both characters in the following example. This requires careful 3D tracking in After Effects. This will be dealt with in some later posts.