SixSibs

I’ve always liked stop-motion animations, but I was never able to really pull one off. The closest I ever got was The Lego Party, which only had a few seconds of Stop-motion animation in it. I decided to try again, and my animation actually turned out pretty well!

With my D3100, stop-motion animation was a lot easier, partly due to its superior technical qualities, but mainly because its just so big! I could set it on the floor where I needed it to be, and it wouldn’t tip over or move at the slightest bump. I used my battery grip as a kind of remote shutter release to help even more. Instead of screwing it into the bottom of the camera, I set it beside my D3100 and plugged the release into the GPS port.

I shot all of this animation in Manual mode. I tried Auto mode, but it wouldn’t give mme enough depth-of-field or consistency. None of the shots in this movie were at an aperture less than F/10, and most were at F/22 or over, some even up to F/36, the highest my 18-55mm will go. If I had set the aperture any lower at such close distances, I would have had less than a centimeter of the scene in the focus plane at times!

I only used natural lighting for this movie, and set the white balance to Cloudy. I had to move my sets around as the day went on, to avoid harsh shadows, but overall it worked out well!

I’ve been playing around with Phun some more, and I made this. It took a while to get the truck-to-gap ratio just right, but in the end, it worked well! I just don’t think this bridge construction method has wide-spread adoption potential. *sigh*

This morning our John Deere Gator (which made a brief appearance as Rachel’s Jeep in Spy Movie 2) wasn’t responding. Around here when something isn’t working people call in the six sibs repair team to fix it. We have fixed mowers, stuck doors, locks, and all sorts of other things with help from our dad (and sometimes by ourselves). It took John, Isaac and I about 10 minutes to take off the Gator seat, the speed control lever and the “gas pedal”  and to figure out what was wrong.  The trouble spot was a little switch that was attached to a little plastic “gas pedal” and was used to make the gator go.

After we got the switch fixed we snapped all of the floor board parts back together and  flipped it over and re-screwed the seat that we had taken off to get to the floor board.

We then tested it out and it worked perfectly!

So our Gator is now back in active duty, ready to haul little boys wherever they might want to go!

We have done some of changes to our cart.

We took off the old huge back  wheels and put on  some new ones that we got from an old golf bag that had removable wheels. The cart goes a lot faster than it used to because the new wheels have much better bearings. You will probably see it in one of our future movies.

Here is our Latest movie:
Enjoy!