Green Man

[Robert Watcher]

I'm not up on all of the different characters from movies and animations - but this green headed fellow showed up as one of them at a dress up party last night.

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While I was there I experimented with something that I have been wanting to do with my camera - but haven't so far - - - creating a movie from a series of still images. I was traveling light and so had no extra gear like tripods or time lapse triggers or shutter releases. So I set the camera on a fence rail, the ground, leaned against a wood pole - while pressing the shutter with my right thumb and stabilizing the camera with my left hand. All in all it worked out kind of cool for a first try.

I recently found out that even though a "time lapse" function is built in to a couple of the new higher end Olympus cameras -------- that there has always been an easy way to do in most all 4/3 and micro 4/3 cameras bodies that I own.

It works by using a combination of the built in Anti Shock function which I set to 2 seconds and putting the camera in motor drive. Ideally it would be good to have some sort of shutter release, but I didn't and so just held down the shutter with my finger without letting up. At some points my hand was shaking, because I was holding on for 5 to 10 minutes at a time. I realized that if I was turning the clips into a 24 frame per second movie - that every minute of continuous shooting with a frame every 2 seconds - - - would result in a 2 1/2 second clip.

For processing the large sequence of large file sizes, my research lead me to Quicktime 7. The newer version on my new Mac, doesn't have that functionality and so I downloaded the version 7 as well. It worked very quickly to turn the folder of files into a mov file. I then pulled that video file into Final Cut Pro X and balanced exposure and contrast and added keyframes to move around the frame for some dynamics.

The cool thing I came to realize was that I was working with a 4,000 pixel wide movie at full size - that allowed easy cropping to 1080p without any image quality loss. The 1,000 frames that I shot for a several minutes each in different areas as a game was taking place - resulted in this 44 second clip:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wac_SG7vjE



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[Asher Kelman]

Rob,

This green man alone is worth the visit! He is so brilliantly believable in this art that one ignores the folded bases from the green appendages that seem to normal for such a species. I really like this character. Think of the care, thought and humor he gave to his character and all the years of comic books and cartoons that qualified him for this role!

The video was a complete surprise as I thought we'd see some of his green ninja turtle relatives or at least some lizards, but not luck. It would be interesting tom map out the social interactions of the folk moving to form new clusters that bread down shortly thereafter, as if it was some kind of speed-dating marathon!

Asher

 

[Robert Watcher]

Thanks Asher.

The theme was nautical - so there were a variety of interpretations from this fellow, to sailors, pirates, Gilligan's Island characters, mermaids, Noah and his ark, Captain Morgan, green slime, Survivor contestants, etc, etc. Some of those are evident in the time lapse video. However a select few like this fellow - were spectacular.