Shooting stop motion.... Part one.

I have decided to shoot my stop motions in two parts, part one will be shooting the actual people and then I will shoot the stop motion backgrounds separately. This will make shooting the people a lot easier! It won't take such a long time which means the shoot will run smoother. To do this I will need to shoot the people with plain backgrounds which will be deleted, to make this work I need to make a make-shift green-screen.

I bought some very bright orange fabric which can be hung behind the people, I was originally going to shoot on plain white backgrounds but decided I would get white highlights on faces etc which would cause a problem...

The first shoot I did was with 3 guys sitting on a sofa...

I lit the backdrop with lamps...

I then got the guys to keep swapping hats whilst I was taking photographs...

I then introduced sunglasses and kept swapping them...
and then gradually flowers until they built up all over them...
The whole idea of the film is to start gloomy and rainy with glum faces, then as the birds and flowers start to appear its all about how fun Meadowlands is!

The shoot took quite a long time, it actually took longer setting it all up than actually taking the photos, I made sure everything was ready to for when I started so the boys didn't move around a lot.

I had the same appraoch with my other 2 shoots.... I did one with Lolly and another with Jay.

I wanted to have a variety of people shown in the films. I am so glad I have finished the filming of the people for stop motions! I am sick of carrying round a shopping trolley full of fake flowers, birds, hats and sunglasses!

I then had to start on deleting all the orange backgrounds in the photographs. I did this using colour range in photoshop and using actions....

I did each set separately until I had transparent backgrounds.

I started with the normal photo...
Started to record an action. I then opened colour range and selected a part of the orange...
I had to turn the 'fuzziness' right down so it wouldn't pick up anything I didn't want it to, like oranges in the flowers or birds.Then hit delete! I did this a few times and then stopped recording.


I then ran a batch on the folder full of the images with orange backgrounds so I didn't have to repeat the process hundreds of times!
I had to run several actions as it still didn't pick up of all of the orange...

I then had to go through the pictures individually and erase smaller blemishes, for example in the photo below, the tape that was holding the fabric up was in shot!

This was probably the most time consuming bit of work I have ever done! Especially for 3 separate films! It took such a long time, even though colour range tool is good, I had to run so many actions to make it work with so many bright coloured flowers in shot too. EVENTUALLY i ended up with all shots of all sets with transparent backgrounds!

After a VERY long time on Photoshop and hundreds of folders of thousands of pictures, they are done!