Month: February 2011

The first scene I will be shooting is Adem dropping pearls on an old wooden floor. I made the floor and did some test shots. What I wanted to have here was a shallow depth of field. Mike has been a huge help on setting up FZ50 and learning about shallow depth of field. Comment section of the previous post here filled with valuable info from him.

As you see in the above picture I have not been able to get the shallow depth of field. I need to get real closed to puppet like it is here:

I am learning things about both photography and using FZ50. It is probably possible to get the shallow depth of field while puppet as a whole and pearls are visible. But I have not been able to make it. So, I tried another way. Just lit the puppet and pearls (I have not made pearls yet. The ones you see here are some steel balls for armature making) and I was able to make the floor’s back edge invisable. Still not there though. I am not totally happy with the quality of the picture… I might make some walls around the floor as I will be also animating the shadow of tree branches before the dropping occurs. I need somewhere to cast the shadows. Maybe right over the spotlight on the floor… I will see. Testing, testing…

I may change Adem’s hands too. I kind of like these big, rough hands. Have not decided yet.

(the following 2 pictures are added on feb 20th.)

If you click on pictures above you can view on flickr. Both larger versions and exif data is available there. There are also pictures with some other exposure settings.

Here you see the floor and making of it:

As a base, I used one of those sticky papers; the ones hanged on the wall to stick stuff. It had some texture and design, which I thought might look good for wooden texture. Washed that with burnt sienna. Cut in pieces. Glued together. Applied some talcum powder. Finishing touches with some walnut ink sent by Shelley! Later after talking to Mike, I made this floor bigger to have a little more space for shooting.

Zeynep… she is 4 now. She came to me saying that she wanted to paint wood piece too and then she decided to paint her face..

And some music time… music is a big part of my life. As a computer graphics designer, I spend most of my time either in front of computer or working on the set. There is always something playing here. I will be posting one song a post. The first one here is from Mercan Dede. (Grabbing video from youtube. No video clip to watch. Or dont even take a look at the video…) I wanted this song to be the first one as this is one of the songs tells a lot to me. Name of the song is “Kanatlar Kitabi” means “The Book of Wings” If you like it, try listening in front of the window when it is raining outside…

.

Another long time with no post and this time I am back… Actually it has been some time since I started working on Chronos again but I wanted to post when I am ready. So, it is about time…

While I was away, we moved to a new house. I did not have a real room to shoot this film so I looked for a rental to make a studio. A cheap place, a barnhouse.. somewhere we can turn into a daytime studio for my film. But, we could not find it. Long story short, I decided to turn a little space here on the roof into a stopmo studio for shooting. This meant Chronos to be a different film. Such a small place for my actual set… It took a while for me to accept this idea. Changing scenario, shooting something else around the same idea… As a “dear friend” said -who has been very suppotive all through the hard times I was going through- maybe my film was born to be something else… Anyways… I have been working on scenario for the last two months. Papers of ideas, different scenarios… As a result there is no real scenario starting from the beginning and ending somewhere. Instead I have some scenes to shoot, to improvise if it is the right word. Actually this fits very well to the life itself. Life we spend in time! Now, there is no big clock. I removed it completely. I will have kush, tree and Adem. Will shoot each seperately and then put together later in the post. No blue screen. Just different scenes coming one after the other. I have some ideas to make it continuous but I will decide when shooting each. I will see how it will turn out. If it does not turn out well; I will be happy because I will leave with such a powerful experience of shooting a stop motion film for many years 🙂 If it turns out well then I and maybe you will enjoy watching couple of minutes of stopmotion film. Both worth trying huh?

So, in this house now I have a space to make props, set, etc.. in the room where we do our web design work and I have a studio in the upstairs for shooting. The other day, while I was trying to setup lights I thought about the places I tried over the last 3 years. In the last 3 years, we moved 3 times. I started this film in a house and then we moved. In that second house, I moved all of my stuff in between different rooms 3 times. And we moved to another house -third one- last summer. This time, while I was settling down with all my stuff I felt really tired.. At the beginning of this film adventure I did not have many things like paints, lights, small and big things.. you know. But, over the time I collected a lot. Now I have many boxes filled with all different kinds of things. Now all settled down, ready to move forward. Ok, enough about my excuses…

Here are some pics of my new studio in the upstairs. There is not any nail on the walls here. To prevent humidity, we need to be careful about putting nails on the walls here. Wood pieces supported with other wood sticks making something like a cage. And lights, curtains are hanged on the wood sticks. It is such a small place but the best thing is it being totally seperated from the house. A spot just for animating. I am still working on setting up lights; just bought some new stuff to hang lights and fish lines to animate some little things, etc…

I will probably replace that green paper cone with a black one. It serves as a spot light. The barn door light you see in the middle is the one I made out of coke cans (by spray painting coke can metal sheets in black) and a garden light while I was working on The Invasion. My turning table is there as a set table and the farest distance my tripod can go is the place you see in the pictures. Not much room to get a real depth. But any problem can be solved huh?… I have a very flexible story to shoot so I can change things anytime I have a problem just like the first scene with a floor turning into a room with walls around. My next post is going to be about this soon.

While I was away I also finished working on The Invasion. Montage was finished and I sent all to my sister for her to do final touches and make the sound. I did not update that film’s blog either. Will post some pics of shooting and part of animation there too.

Two weeks ago there was a really serious flood here where we live. We were out of city for couple of days and it happened. Water was 2 meters high from the ground couple minutes away from our house. It was about 30 cm high here. Nothing happened to our house but many people lost their houses, offices, restaurants,.. I am so sorry for those people who are trying to recover… (Picture on the left is from the news on the net) The strange thing is the flood was very bad around the area I looked for the studio. If had found a place and turned it into a studio for my film and set everything there I would have lost all. My set, camera, lights, puppets.. were going to be all under the water. So, how would you call this? Fate maybe, maybe not… Again I am so sorry for all those people and I am grateful for not being able to rent a place in the fall past.

Edit: Adding this pictures to show the dept of field problem ( or shallow dept of field problem..) to Mike.

.