Watts spent the next months devising and refining a workflow based on using a digital still camera to do stop motion animation. After testing many cameras, the field narrowed to the
Canon EOS-ID Mark II equipped with a CMOS 8.2 megapixel chip and Digic II processor. In the final movie some shots were captured by other cameras, but most of the movie was shot with
32 customized Canons on 32 separate sets at Three Mills Studios in London.
Watts, director of photography Pete Kozachik and motion control technician Andy Bowman modified the SLR camera back, attaching a video tap that swung out for precise focusing. A distinct advantage of the smaller camera, mounted on a computer motion controlled jib arm, was the ability to get deep and tight into a scene and way up close to a puppet character.
Watts devised a base line calibration system that emulated the color space and gamma of Kodak 5248 negative, the film stock Kozachik selected when the project was celluloid based. He rated the cameras at ISO 100 and sometimes ISO 50 when shooting really dark subject matter. He also lit every set film style, and captured every frame in the native camera 3504 X 2336 raw format--the uncompressed data coming off the CMOS chip. Watts used a freeware program built by David Coffin, called
dcraw.c, an ANSI C program that decodes any camera raw file. That code was incorporated into a custom application built by programmers at FilmLight, UK, to convert the camera raw files into standard Cineon images.
Odpowiedz z cytatem