Animation
Digital cameras are ideal for creating simple animations. In
fact you could call it child’s play. This short article
describes how my 9-year-old daughter used PSRemote and the inexpensive
Canon PowerShot A70 to create her first ever animation, “The
Crazy Tea Party”.
Overview
Once I had explained the basic concepts to her she was full of
ideas and couldn’t wait to get started. We decided to keep
things simple for the first attempt and I setup everything and
she did the rest. She prepared her studio and set and selected
her cast of small wooden dolls. I setup a laptop running PSRemote
v1.1 and connected it via a USB cable to a Canon PowerShot A70
camera mounted on a tripod. The camera was set to low resolution
(640x480 pixels) with a manual exposure of around 1/2 sec at f/8
(for maximum depth of field). I checked everything was working
for the first few frames and then left her to get on with it.
Four hours and a change of camera batteries later and it was ready
for assembling into a movie using Microsoft’s free Windows
Movie Maker Software. My daughter was so pleased with the result
that we copied it to CD, printed a nice CD label and she gave
it to her grandmother as a special birthday present. The picture
above shows her working on her second, more ambitious, animation
(this time using a Canon PowerShot G5 with A/C power adapter).
Lighting and exposure control
Lighting was available light from a south facing window with
the camera was set to manual exposure to try to get consistent
exposures. In retrospect this was a mistake because the lighting
varied throughout the day. It would have been better to have used
simple artificial lighting to give more consistent results. This
doesn’t need to be expensive studio lights and can be ordinary
tungsten table lamps - just set the camera’s white balance
set to ‘Tungsten’ to avoid color casts.
Taming autofocus
One of the annoying limitations of Canon PowerShot cameras is
you can’t select manual focus when they are tethered to
a PC. This can be a major problem with animations because auto
focus has an awkward tendency to focus on the background if the
main subject is off center. Fortunately recent Canon cameras allow
you to lock the auto focus and so it is possible to pre-focus
and take a sequence of frames without the focus changing from
frame to frame. The easiest way to do this is set the camera to
use the center focus point and lock the focus at the beginning
of the sequence. It also helps to select a small aperture (e.g.
f/8) to maximize the depth of field. If the main subject is off
center a small object can be placed center frame, the same distance
from the camera as the main subject, and used as a focus target
to lock the focus. Once the focus is locked the focus target can
be removed and the shots for the sequence taken.
Live viewfinder and ‘onion skinning’
A really nice feature of most recent Canon PowerShot cameras
is the ability to display a live viewfinder image on the PC display.
This is a great help when shooting animations because it gives
instant feedback for positioning the models. PSRemote also has
a useful feature called ‘onion skinning’. This is
where the current live viewfinder images are superimposed on the
last image taken. This makes it much easier to see how the next
frame relates to the previous one and makes it possible to remove
a model, adjust it and then place it back exactly where it was
before.
Viewing the ’work in progress’
Not many 9-year-olds have the patience to spend four hours moving
little dolls tiny amounts without having some idea how it will
all look in the end. Several times during the shoot my daughter
wanted to see the animation so far and we found the easiest way
to do this was to use BreezeBrowser’s slideshow feature.
BreezeBrowser was run in a separate window to view the images
in thumbnail mode. To view the animation we simply clicked on
the BreezeBrowser window and pressed F5 (to reload the directory)
followed by Ctrl+A (to select all images), Ctrl+S (to start the
slideshow) and Ctrl+F (to run it as fast as possible).
Panning and zooming
My daughter’s first animation used a fixed camera position
and zoom setting to keep things simple. However, with a bit of
planning it is possible to zoom the lens or pan the camera during
a sequence, for example tracking a car in a race (my 8-year-old
son loves making animations of Lego cars racing each other, but
that’s another story). The trick is to avoid sudden changes
and to keep the zooming as smooth as possible. If you need to
zoom the lens try to do it in small steps over a series of frames
and avoid zooming a single step on it’s own as this doesn’t
look right. When panning try to keep the subject in the same part
of the frame as you follow it through the scene. PSRemote’s
grid overlay display can be very useful here because it makes
it much easier to keep the point of interest in the same position
in each frame.
Putting it all together
There are lots of different applications you can buy to edit
your video ‘footage’ but we decided to keep things
simple and used Microsoft’s free Windows
Movie Maker software. I won’t go into too much detail
as it’s very easy to follow the instructions to create simple
movies complete with opening titles and closing credits.
Run Windows Movie Maker and select “Options...” from
the “Tools” menu. Click on the “Advanced”
tab and set the picture duration to 0.125 seconds. This will play
the animation at 8 frames per second which looks reasonably smooth
(this is the shortest duration Movie Maker allows and so if you
want a higher frame rate you’ll need a different app). Then
go to “Capture Video” in the “Movie Tasks”
window and select “Import pictures”. Use the file
dialog to select all the JPEG images (type Ctrl+A to select all)
and press the “Import” button. Click on one of the
imported pictures, type Ctrl+A to select all and then drag them
to the video time line (your computer may be busy for several
seconds while it processes the images). Use “Edit Movie”
in the “Movie Tasks” window to add some titles and
“Finish Movie” to save it to disk.
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© Copyright BreezeSystems 2004
PSRemote - Creating Simple Animations Canon PowerShot Camera
via USB and Windows PC Computer G2, G3, G5, S30, S40, S45, S50,
A60 and A70
