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Posts Tagged ‘animation’

Michael Stevenson creates Pigeon Pilfer claymation with DSM

Friday, October 9th, 2009

Pigeon Pilfer is a beautifully animated stop-motion film from Michael Stevenson. It is his senior film as a student at San Francisco State University. It took him four months to complete and involved sixty pounds of clay. It was shot with a Canon DSLR using Dragon Stop Motion animation software.

Watch Pigeon Pilfer on Vimeo.

Here are some stills from the film and a behind-the-scenes shot of Michael on the set:

Pigeon Pilfer Still

Pigeon Pilfer Still

Michael Stevenson on Set

We asked Michael if he wanted to share his thoughts about Dragon:

“Dragon is by far the most valuable tool in my stop motion toolbox. I began working on Pigeon Pilfer a few months before Dragon was released, so I tried out most of the available stop motion software on both Mac and Windows. I was so unhappy with it all that I attempted to program my own frame grabber.

“Thankfully Dragon came to save the day just one week before I started shooting. It’s the only software I’ve used that simply steps out of the way – it allows me to animate without being encumbered by a complex frame wrangling workflow. By the end of the shoot it was clear that Dragon had things well in hand—all of my captured frames were very clearly marked and sorted, immediately ready for post production. From start to finish, everything just worked.”

Check out the behind-the-scenes gallery on the Pigeon Pilfer website.

United States of Tara Title Sequence

Friday, January 16th, 2009

Tara Set

Tara Screenshot

During the last couple months I have been working on a the title sequence for the new Showtime series “United States of Tara”. The show stars Toni Collette and was written by Diablo Cody. The idea of the show came from executive producer Steven Spielberg.

The Tara team wanted to have a paper pop-up style opening credits. We worked closely with Tara writer Dave Finkle on the boards and overall concept.

We had a top notch crew working around the clock which included the amazing illustrator Alex Juhazs, the unstoppable stop-motion animator Anthony Scott and the die hard Morgan Hay running the art department and kicking everyone’s ass to get it done. The job was produced through Duck Studios (L.A.) and shot in my satellite studio in Ojai CA.

We shot primarily with the Canon 40D and an iMac running Dragon Stop Motion 1.1. We also used a Nikon D300 and a Mac Pro so we could work in tandem.

We shot everything stop motion and built many working pop-up pages to show the different personalities that Tara shifts into during the first season.

I will be back to post more about these titles after they’re broadcast next week.