This is a low stationary shot with the camera set directly on the floor. Donald appears clutching his paper towels, causing some concern for Leo and Amanda. Leo helps Donald with his overcoat, causing the Bounty to fall and bounce toward Amanda. That happens a little too quickly so I think I’ll work the paper towels into a future scene so we know they’re there.

We see a pantless man enter the scene, dragging a stretch of toilet paper stuck to his dress show. There is only a slight focus pull here.

I originally planned to have Donald’s pants down around his ankles, but I figured I wouldn’t be able to animate him stepping up that step. Turns out that was a mistake. I could have just put the pants around one ankle. Oh well — it’s too late now because I had already animated the next two shots when I remembered this. So now I’m trying to come up with a place to show his pants coming off his feet in an earlier shot. Hard to do when there is timed music involved. We’ll see…

This is a tracking shot that swoops in, under the theater marquee. Right on cue, Amanda emerges from the airlock, assisted by Leonardo DiCaprio in a tux. She is suddenly wearing a business suit and high heels.

Here I go full frame versus 16:9 with a vignette, to sell the idea that this is a film noir production inside POSERS.

The heels are extremely difficult to animate her on, since I’m not using traditional rigging. I’m relying solely on my ability to pose the puppets using their own weight and balance. So there are occasional falls that take a lot of time to reset.

This is a 592-frame tracking shot with a deep focus pull on both ends, starting from The Joker slurping a soda, to our sexy Assistant Director holding a movie clapboard. It took two or three weeks to set this up, running through over a dozen test shots.

This is one of the few live video shots in POSERS, since it was important to catch those animated LED lights in their natural sequence. There are significant technical challenges when mixing live video and stop motion animation. I know what the solutions are, but they require new feature requests from Dragonframe and some custom Arduino programming on my side to create pausable/steppable sequence controllers for the lights. The Dragonframe team also stepped up to fix a few overspeed warning bugs for their new Digital Focus feature.

The music is based on Neal Hefti’s classic Batman Theme, lending this shot a surreal retro feel along with the natural bokah effect. POSERS is probably the shortest film ever with an intermission.