So it's been a damned long time since I last posted and I'm ashamed to admit not a lot has progressed in that time. Exams in July and a summer holiday spent mostly chilling out and relaxing has had me put any developments to one side, and hell do I feel guilty. I have however done tonnes and tonnes of research keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the many forums and blogs dedicated to this and many other relevant crafts. Many an hour has been spent trawling the vast ocean of knowledge out there on nearly every aspect of Stop Motion there is. I've learnt much sat in front of my laptop clicking away and now I feel very prepared and eager to jump in and put it all to use.
One avenue I did experiment with was finding a new camera capable of producing those sought after high resolution frames and control that just cant be delivered by many webcams out there. After countless hours of research on the topic, I finally settled on a model I thought would do what I needed. I had read that with DSLRs, which are becoming very popular with Stop motion, there were problems with the Single Lens Reflex mechanisms breaking due to the sheer number of frames that are taken during animation. When you're a student and you're spending nearly £500 on a new camera, you really can't have it breaking on you. So I scoured the likes of Amazon and the photography review sites to find the next best thing, a Compact System Camera. These are also referred to a Bridge cameras and as such, bridge the cap between consumer point-and-shoot models and DSLRs. These cameras provide the control and quality that I was after and so I went hunting for the right model. It needed full manual controls, the option of a AC adapter, and remote capture software. It also had to be compatible with the framegrabber software I intended to buy SMP7. So my many hours research resulted in the purchase of a Canon Powershot S3 IS for the sum of £100 through Amazon. I thought I had struck gold, and was very happy with the product when it came through the post. I played around with it and found it to work perfectly, full manual control over focus, aperture, exposure and the rest. After a lot of faffing getting the camera, my laptop and SMP7 to work in unison everything seemed to be as it should. Then after toying with the camera controls through the computer, via both the canon remotecapture software and SMP7 I realised to my dismay that I couldn't control the focus. After some reading up on the matter it would seem that the Powershot series do not enable full manual focus control through their software. There is only the option to lock and unlock the Auto Focus. So the camera was sold on and I returned to the drawing board. I then stumbled across the Microsoft Lifecam Cinema and after reading positive reviews on stopmotionpro.com I took a gamble and snapped one up for under £40 from Amazon. It provides 720p HD video has a glass lens and full manual control and will be satisfactory until the day comes when I face the inevitable and purchase a DSLR. I have my eyes already on the Nikon D5000 and I am waiting until the day I feel confident to take that step into the world of expensive equipment.
I also spent some time trying to find a better alternative to my homebrew Milliput eyeballs, as previously mentioned I can't find 8mm loose white plastic ball bearings in the UK so I went looking for alternatives. I found an interesting tutorial on making your own puppet eyes which used white plastic pearls available from craft stores so I went online to find something similar. I happened to find some 8mm opaque white glass beads on the-beadshop.co.uk for a considerable price and placed an order for a pack of 10. I had them through the post in no time at all and I'm pleased with them. The individual beads aren't all entirely round but I picked out a few of the best. I then took the advice of the aforementioned tutorial and dipped them in my enamel paint which I first dripped onto piece of scrap card. I had some trouble aligning the eyes on the cocktail sticks I was using to hold them and getting them close enough to identical was a task but after a few tries I ended with a reasonable pair. I shall post photos on my next post once I have them in my puppet's head... oh I can't wait.
