For my final project I wanted to do another stop motion. This time, though, I was determined to get the green screen to work. In addition to that I was to stray away from the idea of using a green screen and to create an actual set for the scene. I also wanted to play around with some other things that would be new to me.

As far as the green screen goes, I think I had a success. This time around I had a broader knowledge about lighting and I had more lights to work with. That, mixed with a new technique I came up with made the green screen work out. The technique was that I glued together two small cardboard boxes and also glued green paper to it. This acted as a stand for the spaceships in order to raise them from the ground. This meant there would be less shadows in the shot. All in all the green screen worked great. There were definitely times where some shadows appeared that I didn’t expect or even see until editing. The same goes for green reflections onto white figures.

The scene with five clone troopers is actually six different sources all composited together. The background was one source. One of the other ones was the green clone trooper. The four was just one action figure that I used over and over again to make it look like four different people. That whole technique was very fun to put together. Going into the project I had never thought that I would have done that.

For my actual set that I had I used VHS tapes as the walls on floor. I printed off a backdrop of the inside the ship they were on. I cut out the windows and glued green paper to the back. I ended up using some green screen here even though I intended to not do so. I just wanted it to feel more accurate, so I made the windows show outer space.

In this project I created all of my sound effects. I used a snowball mic. For the last project I used creative commons sound effects. This was the first time I created my own. That was interesting. For instance, the ship sounds is just my trucks engine running. The music I did use was from a creative commons source.

The last new thing I tried was having voice talents. In total there were four voice actors. I was one of them. This was my first time having to direct someone other than myself to get what I wanted. That was a really neat experience to see how they thought about things compared to how I did. There were definitely some minor last minutes script changes that were suggestions to me that overall made the video better.

By: Tevin Goddard