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!

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 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.