CompuNirvana.com

Seen that amazing music video for "Her Morning Elegance" by Oren Lavie?  It's generated over 7 million views on You Tube and won acclaim and awards for its creators Yuval & Merav Nathan.

Compunirvana has had the pleasure of working with Yuval, Merav, and Acme Film Works on a new series of stop-motion advertisements being shot here in Los Angles.  The concept is similar to their previous success but has a whole batch of new tricks to show off and a new computer enhanced workflow utilizing Dragonstop, a software designed specifically for stop-motion animation.

As on site editor and digital technician for the shoot I was able to to get an inside look at how Dragonstop and Final Cut Pro can work together to allow filmmakers, animators and artists greater creative flexibility and a more stable workflow.

The real fun begins with Dragonstop. The program allows animators to preview, onion skin, compose and adjust every element involved in visualizing theanimation in a live view environment. It also allows for some degree of camera control such as exposure, color temperature and ISO settings usinga variety of digital video and still cameras. In our case, the Canon 5D Mark II was used with manual Nikon prime lenses to create a sharp high resolution RAWfile that can be imported into the Adobe CS4 Production Suite as an image sequence for final adjustments and color-correction as well as output.

Dragonstop allowed us to capture a RAW image file, high res JPEG and low res JEG for reference simultaneously into well organized bins.  The software also allows the animators to review each move in real time to be sure they are satisfied with evolution of each scene without having to export, render and review anything outside of that environment.  Meanwhile, while they are shooting animations in Dragonstop, the on-set editor is building a 3-frame conform of their animation using the hi-res JPEGs in FCP so that the producers and clients as well as the directors and animators have the ability to see a more robust version of the scene as it is created.

After shooting, the RAW files can readily be imported into a program such as Adobe Bridge for universal color and exposure adjustments, before being sent to Photoshop for more detailed frame by frame modifications.  Once the individual images are set to the designer's satisfaction the entire image sequence is exported to Adobe After FX for final review and finishing.  We look forward to seeing the final results of their work and are proud to have been a part of the project.

Eric Grush, On Set Tech, Compunirvana