armiture trouble

whilst shooting my animation i had several problems with my armiture, the main problem being the size. looking back the armiture was too small to animate the subtle details i wanted. i was advised to make the armiture this size and decided it was the best thing to do at the time because my sets where rather large and if the puppets been any bigger the sets would have been too large to move around and caused more difficulties for me. still my armiture was too small, the main problem was that the tension of the wire did not have enough length to spread out. this caused the wire to snap in several places over the armiture. so during the shooting of 5 shots, halfway through the shot the armiture broke, this put me a day behind eeytime as i would have to leave uni an go home to fix my armiture. at first i just patched up some of the breaks with som miliput and hoped it would hold, when this snapped again and i still had important shots to shoot i decided to try a different way to fix it, i used wire and wraped it around the snapped wire and around the other connection be it the hip or shoulder joints, i used superglue to keep it in place, this worked much better than the first way i tried to fix it and the armiture has not broken since i repaired all of the broken joints this way. this process however did take time and also caused my armiture to grow in hight a little, making her slightly too tall for one of my shots inside the tube, so for this shot i tried to position her and the camera in such a way that it was less noticeable that she was too tall for it. if i had the chance to start again i would do it differently, my armitute would be bigger my sets simpler and less of them. i would have not been so overly ambitiouse with my film and kept things more simple. i feel i over complicated a simple story and caused myself more work and dificulties than needed, if i had spent more time planning the whole process would have been much simpler.

blue/green screen

so i had some trouble with blue screen, the day doe lights in the studio are slightly blue tinted so a blue tinted reverb coverd my whole puppet, i tried many different setting on my camera before i decided to switch to green screen, in some of my shots i still have abit of green reverb on my puppet so there have been several shots i have had to manually delete the background in photoshop on every frame because the colour range in after effects would delete parts of my puppet, such as the eyeballs and so none of the lassoing tools and other tools i would normal use for blue/green screening to supress the green reverb would not work very well either. this has been very time consuming for the shots that had a lot of green on them and i have had to find different ways to edit these shots. i found a tool on after effects called 'spill supressor' that works very well at getting rid of this extra green on my puppet without taking any of the other colours or ruining the images, i was very pleased to find this tool as it makes the shots look so much better with minimal effort.

some final sets