Interesting article on current stop-motion technology.
Tim Burton is releasing a movie: "Corpse Bride" Editors Guild Magazine has an article on the technology behind its making:
'Bride' Stripped Bare
Representing a remarkable step forward in digital filmmaking, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride is a stop-motion animated feature film created through the innovative use of editing and camera technology. Based on a 19th century Russian folktale of a groom (voiced by Johnny Depp) who marries a zombie (Helena Bonham Carter) by mistake, this groundbreaking work features puppets made from stainless steel armatures covered by a silicon skin. Corpse Bride is co-directed by Burton and stop-motion animation veteran Mike Johnson and is scheduled for release September 23 by Warner Bros.
Technologically, this is a movie of many firsts; it's the first feature-length, stop-motion film edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it's the first feature shot using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most significantly, it's the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.
An excerpt talking about their choice of a commercial Digital SLR:
With these issues in mind, Watts set about getting his hands on every digital camera he could find. Canon UK loaned a 10D, a 1D, a 1D Mark 2, and a 1DS. Nikon loaned a D1x, a D100, and one of the new D2H cameras. Watts also tested cameras from Sigma and Kodak. Initial tests were held at Framestore-CFC and the Moving Picture Company in London.
"We shot the same scene on every camera, converted the digital frames using dcRAW [an open-source program that accesses raw digital images], crunched everything to 2K, color-timed the sequences to match using Baselight and then output to film," says Watts. "Basically, everything looked great until the film-originated version came up, then everyone yelled at the projectionist, 'Focus!'" The images from digital cameras looked so stunning when projected. The tests convinced Burton, Johnson, Abbate and executives at Warners.
Very cool -- the article also mentions that the entire project was managed as an XML flat-file database with an entry for each frame. XML is a simple text-based, human-readable way to convey information that although bigger than other formats, offers a lot of versatility. It lends itself very well to automation with script-processing languages like Python (what they used), Ruby or PERL. Hey, disk space is dirt cheap -- about 70 cents/Gigabyte for decent drives. Stop griping about storage space... :)
Setting up a shot.
A frame from the film.
