Point to a good stop motion animation is consistency in each photograph. The exposure levels, camera position, depth of field, everything needs to stay constant for a convincing piece. Which isn't easy. Tomás was keen for us to understand that quality is key. I thought some of it was super detailed and maybe unnecessary, though I say this without fully grasping it yet.
Where print is 300dpi (dots per inch), stop motion usually uses 72dpi.
It's then resized through Photoshop to a set pixel dimension.
HD is 1024x576, HDV 1920x1080.
This is repeated for every photograph through the Action tool, recording the procedure once fully.
Photoshop > New Action
> Record > Open tif
> Image > Image Size > Resolution 72 > Width 1920 Height 1275
> Image > Canvas Size > Width 1926px > Anchor centre
This readies the images for HD widescreens, running at 24fps, 1080p.
When shooting the photographs initially, it's best to do JPEG+RAW. The RAW files are converted to TIFFs to remain uncompressed, unlike the JPEGs.
As for the story, he suggested we plan and map each frame to a storyboard, so that when shooting, there is minimal thinking as documenting alone is quite tough, especially when pressed for time as we are. Then hopefully the shots are more or less already in sequence and ready to be cut to music. This saves valuable time and effort of sifting through, filtering, re-ordering, etc later.
Music choice must be on point to the mood of the story and keep the viewer engaged.
