communication skills assignment 1

First ideas

Animation of a man going into space and visiting the moon and seeing if he any find any life. After a short while of searching he finds an alien and has some fun. The equipment I would need a lot of clay and cardboard so I can make the different sets. My inspiration for this idea is "Wallace and Gromit - A Grand Day Out" as they build a rocket and fly to the moon and whilst there they encounter a robot called Cooker

This will be a time lapse of a night sky starting from dusk and ending at dawn. Shutter speed will be left open longer than usual so that it can gather more light. This will be very challenging as lots of stuff could go wrong but night sky time lapses look amazing if I can make it well. I got my inspiration from YouTube videos people have made and some of the outcomes are brilliant.

This will be a Animation of a person doing their daily tasks around the house. This could be interesting to see as it is such a basic idea but if i plan it out right then it could look really nice. I would film my mum do tasks like ironing clothes, doing the washing, cutting the grass etc.

I chose the night sky time lapse as my animation as I feel like it the outcome if made good could be better than my other ideas, plus a night time lapse is different to a normal one as you have to put a lot more effort in rather than a normal time lapse.

Kit list

• DSLR camera 
• DSLR shutter remote
• Tripod

I will need to find the right location where there is no light pollution and i need to find a night where it is not windy and not many clouds as this might ruin the footage. I will have to do a couple of test runs so that I can find the right exposure times for the camera.

Running times

6 minutes = 1 sec

360 / 25 = 15                    1 frame every 15 seconds

30 seconds

25 frames

750 images/ frames

Tine to have camera running

7 hours = 420mins

420 x 60 = 25,200

25,200 / 750 = 33.6

1 photo every 30 seconds

http://www.lonelyspeck.com/the-milky-way-in-los-angeles-light-pollution/

Preparation

I need to find a day when there was hardly any clouds in the sky and the moon is hardly visible. This is because if the moon is out it creates more light which might disrupt the images. I plan to film at my granddads house as the is no light pollution, this means that when i take long exposures with my camera it wont pick up any light from near by lights. As i am filming a time lapse i need an option so that the camera could take a picture on its own without me having to click the shutter button, as my camera doesn't have a built in intervalometer i will buy one which plugs into the side of the camera.

 The intervalometer as four main settings:

Delay - how long between pushing "start" and the first photo

Long - how long the shutter will be open for

Interval - how often the shutter is triggered

Number - total number of shots taken

Production

Once i got my equipment ready i set up my equipment outside whilst it was still light, this makes it easier to see what I'm doing and i can frame my picture to how i want it. When i finished setting up the tripod and the camera. i had to change the camera settings so it is suitable for a time lapse, first i turn of VR (image stabilization) and turn the focus onto manual mode, this is because if you leave it on auto focus it might focus on something different like a tree when you want the stars to be in focus. Another thing i had to change was the focus ring, i looked through the view finder and focused the a tree far away in the distance then taped the ring so it wouldn't move, the focus is not set to infinity meaning it will be able to focus onto the stars.

I left the camera outside for about 2 hours to let it acclimatise to the cold conditions and once it was completely dark i went outside to do some test shots.

These where the settings for my first test shot:

ISO - 1600

Shutter speed - 20 seconds

Aperture - 3.5

When i looked at the image it was a little bit too light so i changed the shutter speed to 15 seconds, this was better. After fiddling around trying to get the best settings, the images were just getting worse. I gave the lens a wipe and took another test shot, the image was perfect which meant that the lens was misting up as it was in the cold. Unfortunately the only solution to this problem would mean me standing outside all night wiping the lens every half an hour. Also i got a plastic bag and cut some holes in to and placed it over the camera just in case it rained in the night, even though the weather forecast was clear you can never be too carefully. I wiped the lens and started the time lapse which meant by the time i wake up in the morning i could check the images and hope for the best.

When i got up in the morning i went straight outside to check the camera. The battery had died in the early hours of the morning (i didn't expect it too last all night anyway). After i had charged the battery a bit i put it back into the camera and had a look at the images, they looked good but you could see that after a while the lens mists up. Also you can tell in one of the frames i cleaned the lens as it goes from misty to clear.

Post Production

I got all the images from the camera (533) and put them onto the computer, this took a while as they were all shot in RAW format so the file sizes were quite big. I opened up premiere pro and clicked on import media, once you find where your images are kept i needed to click on the first image, click "image sequence" and click the last photo and it should open up all the images as a video sequence. But i had a problem, when i tried to import the photos it was saying the video sequence was only 5:15 seconds long. it had missed out most of the other pictures. After a long time of trying to sort this problem out i realised that it had stopped importing on the image where i cleaned my lens so i imported the first lot of images and then the rest of them.

And as i had 2 image sequences i just put them together and i then had my full time lapse. now that i had my time lapse in place i needed some titles to introduce the clip, i clicked on Title, New title and default still. I typed the title of my time lapse called "The Sky at Night" and dragged it into the time line. I did the exact same for the credits but i also added a fade in and a fade out by command clicking the beginning and end of the title and selection default transitions.

The last thing i needed was music. I wanted some nice piano music in the background so i went onto Free Music Archive and found a nice piece of music that fit well with my time lapse. Also everything on the site is public domain which means that no one owns copy-write so that everyone can use it. Once i downloaded it and put it into my time line i was ready to export. I went into export and media, this gave me loads options but all i needed to do was click on h.264 and then scroll down to HD 1080p 23.976, gave it a sensible name and then exported it.

Outcome

I was very pleased with the outcome of my time lapse as you can clearly see many stars and the music went perfectly with the clip. Next time i would prefer to make a time lapse in summer as its warmer on a night meaning the lens wont fog up and i get a clear picture.

http://freemusicarchive.org/