My wife and I celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary this year. I wanted to create a short stop-motion video for her. Here is what I came up with…
The first attempt is a quick and dirty Lego animation. It’s obviously pretty rough, but keep in mind that we’re all quarantining in the house together ALL THE TIME, so I can’t get any alone time to work on this unless I stay up and do it in the middle of the night. This was shot on an old iPhone6, using EpocCam to connect it via Bluetooth to Stop Motion Studio Pro running on a Surface Pro 4. I used EpocCam because Stop Motion Studio Pro’s built-in Bluetooth hookup just didn’t really work. The EpocCam software didn’t work very well either: the bluetooth dropped out a lot and it was hard to reconnect. I still like the walk cycles 😀
This next attempt was also shot using the old iPhone6. This time, I connected it via USB cable with iVCam. This worked a little better – once the the connection was established, it didn’t get dropped while shooting. But… getting Stop Motion Studio to recognize the iVCam was problematic. Again, I did this in one marathon shoot in the middle of the night, but if I had turned everything off and come back the next day to start shooting again, getting the iPhone reconnected would have been a real problem. I didn’t create enough in-betweens when moving the blocks, but I still like this one
After all of my technology issues creating these videos, I bought some real animation software: DragonFrame and a Canon EOS Rebel Digital SLR for future animation work. It’s been really great to NOT spend hours fighting with the camera setup and spend that time animating instead. I hope to post some videos shot with the new setup soon!