Brickfilms Tutorials Website – Design Critic

 

I attended a one day seminar on website design and optimisation today. The attendees offered up their websites for criticism. Boy did they take my website at http://www.legomation.com/  apart page by page. I walked away from it intent on redesigning it from the ground up.  However when I did some research on the company website of the guy running the course I noted that my site ranked alot higher than his website.  So I’m left wondering when I should compromise my ranking by redesigning and maybe losing my spot on Google !

Moved Over to WordPress

Decided to move over to WordPress for our Blog. We were having too many problems trying to publish via FTP to Blogger.com 

 

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Installing XP over Vista Home Premium

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Installing XP over Vista Home Premium

I found Vista didn’t work well with some of the StopMotion animation programs I wanted to use (in paticular Animaationkone ) so I decided to install XP. Now Dell do not officially support XP on my new Inspiron 1720 but I managed to get it working and found all the drivers I needed.

I wanted to install XP Pro instead of Vista home premium on my new Dell Inspiron 1720 so here are the steps that worked for me, you might find them useful.

Step 1
Go into the BIOS by hitting F2 on boot up and turn off Flash cache module & change SATA from AHCI to ATA. This is the most important step…if you do not complete it you will not be able to install XP.

Step 2
Put XP CD in CD drive

Hit F12 at start up ( Black and White Screen )

Choose CD/DVD drive to boot from by hitting enter…
Press Space Bar ..(any key) to boot from CD

Should then go to Blue Setup Screen

Step 3

(I decided to delete my partition and reformat it but you normally would not have to do this)

Choose Set up Windows XP by pressing Enter

Page down…Press F8

Choose the Partition you want to install XP no …normally C drive ..

Step 4
Press L to delete existing OS on choosen Partitiion.

Setup Begins…

When complete you should get something like this..

Now when this completes ie boots in to Windows XP you will have to install a few drivers to get your network card wireless adaptor , sound card and video drivers etc. to work.

Also note that if you do not have Service Pack 2 on your install CD then you should Download Service Pack 2..

If your XP CD does not have Service Pack 2 then download Service Pack 2 using this link.

Drivers You Might Need !

R180917 NVidia Graphics Drivers

R153997 Intel Chipset

R171789 Sound Drivers

R149798 Network Card (Broadcom)

 

Hope this works out for you if so why not visit our Brickfilm site here.

Best Lighting for Brickfilms (Stop Motion Animation for Minifigs)

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I was asked what the best lighting to use for Stop motion animation Brickfilms recently…so here is my advice..

Lighting – 3 Point System ( More Information and Diagrams available at http://www.legomation.com/

A basic lighting setup for Stop Motion animation should include at least 2 lamps to light up your scene and reduce or avoid shadows.
However you should ideally have up to 4 light sources or lamps. But don’t be put off, 2 will work quiet well. If you are using 4 lamps then they are categorised as
A Back light – to illuminate the subject from behind.
A Background light – to illuminate the background of a shot.
A Key light – the main light source illuminating your subject or scene.
A Fill light – to illuminate or fill in shadows and reduce contrast.
The use of four lights is called three-point lighting. But you said four lights or lamps..I know but the background light is not counted really as it does not illuminate your subject but more the backdrop to your characters or subject.
The combination of the four lights placed in the right position, with the correct intensity and with the right quality will create an excellent effect.
Firstly the “Key Light” is the main light that you will use for your brickfilms. It important that your key light is not too hard or too soft. By this we mean too bright or too dull (soft). If your light is very bright you can tone it down with greaseproof paper (also known as cooking paper / wax paper). We will talk more about this in our “brickfilm lighting tutorial” in the tutorial section.

Key Light
This is the main light. It is usually the strongest and has the greatest influence on the look of the scene. It is placed to one side of the camera/subject at anything from 15 to 45 degrees so that this side is nicely lit and the other side has some shadow.

Fill Light
This is the secondary light and is placed on the opposite side of the key light. It is used to fill the shadows created by the key. The fill is usually be softer in tone and less bright than the key. To achieve this effect, you could move the light further away or use greaseproof paper.

Back Light
The back light is placed behind the subject and lights it from the rear. Rather than providing direct lighting (like the key and fill), its purpose is to provide definition and subtle highlights around the subject’s outlines. This helps separate the subject from the background and provide a three-dimensional look.

Daylight is an alternative to artificial lights. However, the problem with relying on sunlight is that the sun moves in the sky throughout the day. Shadows will move on your set following the path of the sun. Clouds and other objects in the path of your light will cause unexpected shadows that you may or may not notice until after you have finished shooting your footage. If you do shoot by sunlight, be sure to work in the middle of the day when the sun’s position in the sky remains fairly “constant”. There are problems that you will encounter when lighting brickfilms that you would not normally encounter when filming people or other larger subjects and they are caused by their small size and their high reflectivity. Even when using the 3 point lighting system described you still may get white spots on you characters or bricks because they are so shiny and reflective. However if you do encounter this then either move your lights back from the characters or use more greaseproof paper. Experimentation is the only way you will get it right in time as every bodies setup will be invariably different.