A New Game progress (filming at last!)

Here's the first scene we shot. It's Zack playing on the controller, until Lulu powerslides into frame (while saying "Heya Zack!"), stands up and says "Watcha doooing?". We had the characters remain completely stationary while talking so we can copy and paste the frames necessary to time out the shots.

While shooting, someone accidentally knocked the tripod holding the camera, causing the scene to shift so we taped it and the chair holding the light down to prevent further shifting.

I then timed out the lip flaps for act 1 by importing my animatic to ToonBoom, setting the framerate to 10f/s and counting the frames to each sound/ lip movement

 A screenshot of the excel sheet I made. I colour-coded the dialogue to the characters and added notes to help make the printout easy to understand

Here's a .gif of the progress we made in our second session.
It went a lot faster as we had our lighting and camera already set up and I had timed out the dialogue (although it may be unnecessary because Adobe Aftereffects can time out dialogue). In all, we made about 20s of footage in 3 hours, so in the next session we'll be able to finish act 1 if we're lucky.

 Chloe setting the scene

 Chloe sorting out the lip syncing during the shoot

 Marilyn on Dragonframe

Marilyns hand was caught in a frame, but that can be edited out using Adobe Aftereffects.

We finished off act 1 and we plan on doing the living room scenes in act 3 before the holidays finish as I have to return the equipment and We don't want to do the lighting and camera placement again.

Stop-motion review: The Maker by Christopher Kezelos

 

The Maker is a short film about a rabbit-creature racing against time to make another of itself. Although I was a bit leery of the creation seemingly immediately falling in love with the creator, I was immediately fascinated by what happens when the hourglass ran out and was reset.
I found this film to be interesting, as the small complex elements of the creatures workshop were interesting to catch on repeat viewings and the musical score matched the frantic (and deliberately repetitive) pacing.

The making Of video is also interesting to watch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KavpG2t6qD8), as it shows the level of detail that went into each shot, as well as detailing the process from concepts to animating.