Final Project – Puppet Animation

Now being that I wanted my puppet animation sections to be pushed to a new skill level as I had done with my puppet making stage I had to get a good even level lighting when capturing the frames. This therefore meant I found myself focusing on how the lighting was for each scene far more. For the planet scenes with my ‘Dream Director’ puppet I booked out a separate room for the capturing of the shots so that I could fully control the surroundings I was in. It took several hours of set up but once complete I could make the planet appear to float within each shot taken.

For the close up shots I only needed to simply capture the front of the planet and so the table set up was far easier to work with and animate around. And therefore made animating these scenes far quicker, however for the scenes where I wished to show the entire planet within the shot this was not a workable angle and so the set up evolved.

This set up took a lot of trial and error, trying to get the black fabric in the right layout around the planet and in angle with the camera and making sure to also have the right setting on light brightness and angle was highly important. Once I got the right look ready I started to capture each of the shots needed to get the movements I wanted. Overall it worked really effectively and I feel really proud of the shots I got within these scenes.