miniature stop motion lighting

the task: the rain stops, the clouds move apart, the sky clears and the full moon shines through onto the miniature landscape . I thought the best approach would be to use paint on a role of clear gel; to spray the whole movement of the clouds (from total black to clear gel) onto the gel and then move it over the landscape. for the moon we used a pack of 12V single kinoflo kits. Interesting enough it seemed to look better then the bouncing light off a showcard. Fortunately, the decision to animate the whole procedure with stop motion rather then filming it, made the rig alot easier for unrolling the gel to produce a smooth animation. We were really pleased with the results - the change in weather looks amazing! Although I had never done stop motion before I had no idea that each photo takes about 5 seconds to shoot, readjusting the next frame another 5 seconds - and this 500 times ... ouch. Maybe I should have built a motor controlled system after all!

What I did build were some small hallogene 12V/10W lamps which fit into the model -I put them on a dedo hand dimmer (added some extra ballast to get the 60W necessary for the dimmer) and it worked quite well. But one has to be careful about the heat from one of these little globes - one tends to underestimate the heat of such a little cute thing! for pics please click here and visit the gaffers diary.