On Thursday October 28, 2010, I got a phone call from Marylou telling me the news that Chris Nolan revealed the title to his 3rd Batman film which is named, “The Dark Knight Rises”. First off, let me tell everyone that doesn’t know me, I don’t keep up with comic book news. Marylou is the one that is into comics, hence “Comi Girl”. Growing up exposed to comic books and currently a casual reader of them (not into the superhero stuff), when I come across comic book related news on the internet, I pass that info over to Marylou. If she doesn’t have time to post the info on the website, then I do it, along with the other responsibilities that I have here.
So after Marylou told me about the 3rd Dark Knight film, I went straight to the source to read the article (LA Times – Hero Complex blog) and did a Google search on the title of the film to see what came up. The real time Twitter feed popped up on Goggle’s home page and it was the trending topic of course, but what was crazy to me were all the interesting things people were saying about the upcoming Dark Knight film. People were talking about the chosen title of the film, the villains that should be in the movie, and a few people were making gay jokes about Batman & Robin (The Dark Knight Rises is what Robin said while sitting on Batman’s lap. Not my joke people, not my joke). After being humored for a minute, I went back to the Hero Complex to read some of the comments that people were starting to post and it was all similar, including a few post that mentioned The Joker & Harvey Dent reappearing in the film. And that gave me an idea.
I told Marylou that we should do a short stop motion film about the news and about some of the comments that people were leaving on Hero Complex & Twitter. She agreed to it and had a few ideas of her own, so we decided to make two separate films and post one on the Comi Girl YouTube channel, and the other on our second YouTube channel joyriot (which is our animation channel).
Marylou bought some props to go with her idea, two tombstones, a soap dish, & some black napkins which worked well with the collectibles she wanted to use. (While Greg wanted to incorporate internet comments on the film, I wanted my script to incorporate what is happening in the comics- Marylou) The “Cosbaby” were unwrapped from their protective covering and she started on her script, which basically was about Batman being raised from the dead (the comic book readers know what this is about). Originally we had the idea of burying Cosbaby Batman in some dirt, preferably in a coffin, but with no mini coffins laying around, and the unrealistic time limit that we placed on ourselves of having the video up in time for Halloween, we had to keep things simple.
My idea also involved using the Cosbaby along with a 1/6 scale Joker collectible that we have sitting on Batman’s Batpod, and both of Marylou’s favorite toys; the 2 1/2Ft. tall Superman & Batman. My script came out a few pages longer than Marylou’s because I wanted to incorporate what people were saying about The Joker, Harvey Dent, and Batman & Robin’s love affair. There are no female villains in the first two Dark Knight movies, so I put Catwoman in the script and talk of Harley or Poison Ivy showing up in the movie. I also wanted to put in the fact that Chris Nolan has the title to Batman’s movie, and not Superman’s, and I also wanted the blaring horns from Chris Nolan’s recent film, “Inception”.
Once we got the script finished (Marylou’s took all of five minutes, mine took like an hour) the first thing we did is record our speaking parts into a Zoom H2 portable recorder. Marylou speaks in her natural voice and I change her pitch to a higher tone in the video editing software, and I also do the same thing, but only for the Batman & Robin “Cosbaby”. With the other characters, I change my natural voice.
Next, I had to take pictures. Up first was Marylou’s script. Her script might have been short but figuring how I was going to make Batman come back to life in a convincing manner, was going to be tricky. For one, the Cosbaby are not ideal toys to use for stop motion. They have a hard time standing upright even though they have big feet, and since I don’t have stop motion software much less a camera to support that, I had to make sure that the Cosbaby stayed in whatever position that I placed them in. I was also unable to screw/mount the Cosbaby to anything since they were the only ones that Marylou has, and therefore cannot easily be replaced. Secondly, the script called for a night scene. Going outside to take the pictures was not ideal, so instead, I opted to use the top part of a glass shelf, a black cardboard for the background, two emergency LED lights (bottom lighting), one LED keychain light (for top lighting), and some packaging material that acted as light diffusers. The camera used was an 8 megapixel point & shoot, and exposures taken were a few seconds long for each shot. After a couple of hours and close to 100 pictures later it was time to move on to my script.
2 1/2Ft. tall Superman & Batman were easier to work with. Marylou allowed me to put two tiny holes in their feet so I could screw them down, which I did to some black cardboard. To give Superman added height so he would seem like he is standing next to the desk where Batman is sitting, the cardboard was velcroed to an Ikea storage box, which was turned upside down. Batman is sitting in the office chair, and although he can’t actually get in the sitting position because his range of motion is limited, he bends just enough (at the hip joint) that he is actually sort of…standing in the chair. For their lighting, I used one 14watt CFL “daylight” bulb on the floor facing up under the desk (housed in an inexpensive hardware light fixture, and diffused with the packaging material), one 9watt CFL bulb at desk height but facing toward a corner wall, and one of those emergency LED lights (used on Cosbaby) that I shined on top of Superman & Batman during the few seconds’ long exposure. The 1/6 scale Joker & Batpod was very easy. I simply moved him down from the top floating shelf onto the bottom floating shelf, and he was lit with just one of those emergency LED lights during a few seconds’ long exposure. I placed the Cosbaby on a shelf that sits on the desk, and they were lit with those two emergency LED lights. One light was a few inches in front of them and slightly below, and the other I shined on top of them during the few seconds’ long exposure. From script to picture taking, it was about 12 hours straight through.
Then it’s time to edit our speaking parts. I use the audio editing software that’s built into my video editing program for this. The volume is matched, down sampled from 48k to 44k, every line of each character gets a separate sound file, and sometimes individual words spoken from each line gets its own sound file.
Once that’s done, it’s time to edit the pictures. I select the matching ones, then resize, sharpen, and make color & exposure adjustments. This is all done with PhotoScape (a free picture editor).
From there I open my video editing program and take the edited sound files, place them in the timeline, match them to the script that we each wrote, and add the pictures that correspond to each sound file. It sounds easy at this point, but actually it’s not. When I’m taking pictures of the toys in the beginning of this whole process, I take pictures of the toys using different camera angles, both close up and wide shots. This enables me to use the right shot for each line in the script, but with different camera angles at my disposal, I can change the whole look and feel of the movie to whatever works best, and not just what was written in the script. But I try to speed up this process and avoid doing re-shoots or re-writes by writing down the camera angles into the script, which is the reason why my scripts tend to be long. The video editing program that I use is called, Magix Movie Edit Pro v.15+. This is a real good video editor especially if you’re concerned about the sound quality of your movies. Once I’ve selected the pictures that I want to use, which were about 16 for Marylou’s script, and about 40 pictures for my script, it’s onto the animation part.
People often ask us, what do you use to get your toys to talk? And my usual reply is, “3D animation software”. Crazy Talk the 2D facial animation software that I use, lets you create “talking animations” from your pictures, but rarely do I see videos or stop motion films of action figures/toys, that were made using Crazy Talk. There are other ways to get your action figures/toys to talk, but I find that Crazy Talk is a great tool in this regard. You can animate up to four characters at a time with this software, and yes as the picture shows you, you do have to set the animation points manually on whatever it is that you want to animate/talk, but to speed up the workflow, you can just reuse certain pictures and simply replace the audio/sound file of that picture. There are other features to this software, but I use it primarily for this one purpose. Once I learn how to use compositing software I’m going to try to incorporate the use of Crazy Talk into that workflow, and see what comes out of it. After all of the Crazy Talk files are done, I then put those into a new project in the video editing program. At this point I also use pictures that weren’t animated, so those go onto the timeline with the animated sequences. After I’m satisfied with the results, it’s time to add whatever music/sounds that I’m incorporating into the film.
Magix also makes other software. I have a free version of their music making software (bare bones edition) that I downloaded a long time ago. I don’t think they offer it anymore, but there is other “music making” software out there, so it really doesn’t matter what you use in that regard, but I tend to use this stripped down software for quick arrangements of my sound files and loops. For my script, I wanted to incorporate the music that was in Chris Nolan’s “Inception”. Once I got the right sound, I manipulated it in the audio editor of the video editing program then put it into Magix’s stand-alone music editor. I layered some other sounds to it and although it took the whole day to get the sounds to work the way I wanted them to, overall I felt it captured the essence of those blaring horns in the movie, Inception. After that was complete, I adjusted the speaking parts, added the high pitch tone to some of the Cosbaby, exported the finished video out to be converted with another software then uploaded it to YouTube to see how it all looked. I had to make some adjustments with the final video then re-upload to YouTube, but all in all, after spending at least 12 hours a day working on two stop motion short films in a week’s time, it’s now time for me to stop and get some rest, because a week from now, I’ve got another stop motion short to do…jeez.
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