James has peed on Buddha’s lamp and the resulting power surge has rocked Sushi’s world.
This scene is a quick twist shot done with the camera facing out and away from its Tilt axis servo on my eMotimo Spectrum ST4. The effect is that Sushi’s precious Me Time has been intruded upon and literally upset. To sell the anti-gravity gag, I animated that giant crystal to appear to slide downhill across the top of her wall unit. Note her little paint brush and palette. Also we can start to appreciate the sexy samurai outfit she wears while painting.
Remember: If you have a good MOCO system, physical camera moves are always more convincing than doing them in post. Because you can’t fake parallax or lighting and shadow movements in Final Cut Pro. You can only simulate them. What you want is to always capture the actual photons if you can.
Note that these interior shots of Amanda’s minka were shot out of order because I used the same set box for the exterior. Shoot all the patio shots first, then reconfigure and shoot the living room. If he were to do it again I would have made the set 4×4 feet and put it in a turntable. Oh well…
Enter the world of Sushi Buffet. She’s putting the final touches on her masterpiece, a mural called Godzilla Arrives that I actually created with my wife at Portland pub’s Paint Night.
All of the 1:6 scale furniture you see here is part of a series of upscale doll house furniture made in China. The craftsmanship is amazing! We’re viewing the living room through an Oriental half moon bed that I built myself from a rosewood kit. I tried to reproduce the wax-like finish on the other pieces, but fell a little short. That bed is actually on another platform across my studio, and the camera tracks through it for forced perspective. We’ll visit the minka’s bedroom later in the film — wink, wink.
Notice the lair is tilted a little off kilter. This is an homage to the original Batman TV show, where we might start to think this woman is up to something nefarious. You’ll see more of that supervillainy goodness later on.
The other thing to note about this shot is the earthquake appears to be happening only outside Sushi’s time and space. And why can we hear that water fountain from inside? Hmmm…
This is the last shot of Act 1. James leaves Sushi hanging in her doorway to go taunt the home’s actual owner via her security camera.
This was shot on my iPhone 11 Pro, mounted to the wall near the tiny security camera prop we saw before. The animation was controlled nicely via the Stop Motion iOS app.
That line always cracks me up. Sushi’s voice actress is Korean and her pronunciation was alway delightful. She was a good sport but she would probably gaff at the final product.
This line took several back-and-forths to get right, because apparently in Korea, that line was never uttered on a playground while a male bully assaulted a young girl by twisting her nipples back and forth like radio dials. That’s probably a pure Americanism, after WWII and Tokyo Rose. But with a little coaching, we nailed Sushi’s line on exactly the eleventh take.
The blazing machine guns are a mirrored shot of a Japanese Zero fighter plane, again playing off the symmetrical nature of how men’s brains are wired to response to bare breasts.
I’ve heard some comments from friends that this scene feels “racist.” To which my response is, “Interesting. Was Roots racist?”
Well here’s the money shot, as they say. Sushi playfully teases James bare-breasted, holding a platter of sushi while a squadron of Japanese Zeroes gather behind her in preparation for a strafing run at James.
Phicen’s medical grade silicone bodies come anatomically correct, but unpainted. So I stole my wife’s most extensive lipstick pen and gave Sushi the best areoles I could muster.
The sushi platter was made in Thailand with incredible detail as you can see. It’s one of the first props I acquired, and it was the inspiration for Sashimi Buffet’s nickname.
In post I had the option to stabilize the shot on either Sushi’s breasts or the food platter. Always choose breasts when facing this dilemma.
Sushi puts her face diaper back on, standing in the doorway. This was actually a green screen shot. She is animated, but the wooden screen and the pink plant behind her are a handheld iPhone video shot. I love how this turned out, with the colors and the natural movement from James’ POV as he weaves and bobs.
Sushi takes off her face diaper so James can see her face. I did this delicate move with a wooden skewer to slip the loops over her ears.
There’s a slight breeze in the air so I also animated her hair. Actually, you can cover up a lot of fabric and hair “boiling” during stop motion animation by simply pretending it’s windy. You learn rather quickly to turn bugs into features in this business.
Okay, here we go with my first flying scene. Degree of difficulty? Yes.
The murder hornets we met in shots 105 and 107 have gotten curious while James and Sushi try to work things out.
I went through a dozen setups for this key shot, and settled on creating a bridge from my camera table to my set table using a steel yardstick. The space between those tables is where I need to maneuver in order to animate the scene.
These hornets came with stands, and the yardstick has all the inches marked off, naturally. So the goal was to make the Boss Hornet jump off the cherry tree and fly over to the Vespa for a better look.
If you look close in the bottom right shadows, the smaller hornet is already on the patio, playing with (and wearing) the hat James threw over there previously.
Okay, so how do we pull this off? Through a process called rigging and de-rigging.
First, for every shot in the sequence we take two exposures. These get put into separate timelines by the Dragonframe animation software. You can use multiple exposures for just that — typically different F-stops. Or you can use them for creating background plates for shots like this.
A background plate is an exposure that has everything except the flying object that you’re animating.
Then you take the real shot of the flying object either held up by a stand, or hanging from a string.
And finally, in Photoshop, you erase the rigging in the top layer, thereby exposing the background within the area you erased. This must be done for every affected frame, and then the video is reconstructed in Final Cut Pro from the processed frames.
And like magic, the flying hornet’s stand disappeared from the composited clip.
So for each frame, I moved the hornet’s stand by a set number of inches, easing into it from the jump-off point, then accelerating, and then slowing for an air-brake landing with wings spread.
Yes, it’s painstaking. But so is life. And the payoff was awesome, watching my wife’s jaw drop the first time she saw a buzzing, flailing piece of plastic fly across my studio. And better yet, a friend actually asked me if that was CGI (Computer-Generated Imagery)!
When the Boss Hornet lands on the Vespa, I made sure to animate the Vespa rolling back to sell the audience on the physics of the situation. I mentioned that I own an actual Vespa, so a sound effect of something hefty (like me), jostling that real scooter with a satisfying ‘clunk-clunk’ completes the illusion.
Don’t forget the power of a good sound effect!
Oh — before we leave this shot. The green screen you can see through the open door will be filled in later with a properly angled interior shot.
