Director Johnny Kelly and the team at Clapham Road Studios UK serve up another ambitious stop motion feast. Shot using Dragon Stop Motion animation software, the camera flies through full-size artwork, including a play button covered in real gold leaf. Â The project is part of a collaboration between You Tube and the Guggenheim Foundation that will showcase creative clips from around the world.
They have already racked up over one million views. Make sure to check out the Making of as well.
Nexus Productions and director Johnny Kelly combine classic stop motion animation with quick and affordable 3D printing technology to create title sequences for the popular Dutch science show “Het Klokhuis” (Apple Core).
The titles are currently featured at The Art of the Title Sequence, where Johnny Kelly provides a lot of behind-the-scenes details on the production process.
The sequences were shot at Clapham Road Studios, a studio in London that specializes in stop motion animation. Director of photography Matthew Day shot with Dragon Stop Motion software and has used it on numerous projects there.
Click here to watch the opening titles.
Click here to watch the end titles.
Director to watch; Sean Pecknold has once again created an inventive stop motion film with elegance and charm. This time for The BBC Knowledge Channel. Make sure to check out the behind the scenes photos from his site.
Sean Pecknold
Animator, Britta Johnson
Brent Barson and a team of design students and faculty at BYU created the opening titles for the 5th Typophile Film Festival. The stop motion animation sequences were created with Dragon Stop Motion, the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 40D.
Typophile Film Festival Opening Titles
The title sequence was recently featured on Motionographer.com
We asked Brent about his experience using Dragon Stop Motion:
Cinematographer Wynn Burton had this to say about Dragon Stop Motion:
Most of what we shot could never have been done without it—particularly previewing capabilities and easy keyboard navigation.”
On Saturday, September 12, Jamie Caliri and his crew won the Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design. The sequence, produced by Duck Studios features pop-up book style animation and was shot entirely with Dragon Stop Motion.
Click to Watch
Credits:
Executive Producer: Mark Medernach
Director/Designer: Jamie Caliri
Illustrator: Alex Juhasz
Lead Animator: Anthony Scott
Title Producer: Morgan Hay
Check out the previous blog posts about the title sequence:
United States of Tara Title Sequence
More on United States of Tara Titles
Animating on ‘United States of Tara’
Director Simon Clowes and Director of Photography, Daria Polichetti of Prologue teamed up to create these eye-catching end titles for the horror/thriller “Orphan”. The project was shot using Dragon Stop Motion with a Canon 5D Mark II.
Daria Polichetti tells us about the project:
The Orphan end credits, designed and directed by Prologue’s Simon Clowes, focus on the main character, Esther, a girl with a secret and a hidden past. But when the darkness falls, Esther’s personal obsessions and malicious intentions are finally revealed beneath the eerie shades of a blacklight.
Derived from the climactic blacklight sequence near the end of the movie (for which the VFX were also designed and produced by Prologue), the main on end sequence for Orphan uses the concept of blacklight photography to reveal credits and hidden imagery lurking just beneath the surface of the scene.
Using Dragon allowed for a great deal of control. The software allowed the team to shoot and edit frames accurately between the regular light the blacklight setup. Multiple channels can be programmed into the software for each take, which allowed the shooting of two light passes simultaneously in a single camera move, saving time in the painstaking process as well as allowing for seamless cuts between the two passes.
Credits:
Designer / Director: Simon Clowes
Producer: Ryan Robertson
Director of Photography: Daria Polichetti
Coordinator: Lee Buckley
Executive Producer: Kyle Cooper
Click to play
Digital Kitchen Seattle just completed this cinematic opener for SIFF. We are so excited to see studios like DK creating fresh, inventive work with Dragon Stop Motion.
Justin Cone of Motionographer asked Digital Kitchen about their process:
In executing the piece, we created a small set-up in our Seattle studio consisting of two rear-illuminated lightboxes made of 5 panes of glass layered on top of a diffusion layer. Each layer of glass had an element that was either animated frame by frame or was static to create the environment.
For example, a scene might have a layer of diffusion, a painted layer, a layer of characters that we could articulate, and a layer of organic materials, etc. that created the environment. We mounted a Canon Rebel XSi over animation stands, and connected directly to a Mac Pro workstation running the stop-motion software Dragon.
(Although looking at the making-of footage it looks like a Mac Book. Maybe they have two stations?)
Here is a link to the final film.
click to play
Josh Goodrich and David Hill of Santa Maria give us a behind the scenes peek of their J&B ampersand logo set up. We asked them to tell us how Dragon Stop Motion was used in the process.
Dave and Josh:
Dragon software was very easy to set up with the camera we used, a Nikon D90. It also let us go back and preview/edit our footage, which was very important to us, for our amount of experience. The fact that the prop had to move on a turntable was the biggest technical challenge, so to be able to see it working sped up our shooting process.
We started out with a few animation tests and then went right into shooting the final piece. We had two full days dedicated for the shoot and a week afterward for post. The planning part was very involved because everything had to be blocked out perfectly and in the right order. The sculpture was built by set builder Andy Byers, which came out exactly how it was imagined.
Big thank-you to Josh and David for sharing!
P.S. Dragon Stop Motion is the only stop motion system to pull in the live view from Nikon cameras like the D90. You just plug the Nikon D90 into the computer with one USB cable and you are ready to shoot.
I met Jamie while working on ‘Coraline’ in Portland, OR so I was excited to get the chance to work with him again on the USofTara credit sequence. I was also very interested in testing out the features of his stop-motion software, Dragon.
When I arrived, Jamie had shot a test using a real pop-up book synced to temp music. We studied how real pop-up books moved when opened and wanted to translate this type of movement into the sequence. Many setups were actually built to move like a pop-up but some needed help, and others, well, we took liberties with the movement. We never strayed too far though.
Dragon was a joy to work with. I had previously tested the basic controls but on this job I was able to see what else it could do. Calculating camera moves for our manual rig, Multiple exposures while shooting, and utilizing the Cinematography window were just some of the benefits of working with this amazing program.
Here are a few more shots of our production plus a link to the Quicktime.
Click here to view the title sequence.
Facebook