Progress of the Accidental Engineer: or why we chose to shoot the first 10 scenes again.

*note: I'm having some trouble loading poster frames for the 3 clips below, but they are there.
Some at Tippett Studios may remember late last year when Chuck Duke walked away from his desk, and more importantly his computer, to work on his very own stop motion film. They may also remember when he didn't come back in January as expected. The word on the QT was that he had to re-shoot the first part of the film. This is true, but not without good reason.
From the beginning, I made a fuss about the motion of the dock. We tried our best to get a natural movement without spending a year to do it. The closest we could come was smooth, but not rocking.
Here's a dump from the frame grabber of the first shot. As you can see, it looks as if we're simply raising the dock up and down on a tripod. We literally were.

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Here's what Chuck accidentally engineered. By pitching the center of the dock between 3 and 9 degrees and rotating it incrementally he managed to get a steady rocking motion.

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This more complex movement and sense of queasiness is why we chose to re-shoot the first 10 scenes. It's going to be worth it.

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