About "Good Day, Good Night" (2/2 - Regarding the video)

*This post is a sequel to my former posts. If you want to read the former ones, you can read them using these links:

Good Day, Good Night (May 6, 2011)

About "Good Day, Good Night" (1/2 - Regarding the song) (May 23, 2011)


I had originally planned to upload the song to YouTube. YouTube is the easiest to access for everyone, rather than Myspace or SoundCloud.
When I had written up the song, I thought it should be shown with the lyrics because of its character and concept.
I didn't want to just show all the lyrics at the explanation area of the YouTube page. Personally, I don't like listening to songs while reading the lyrics. It makes me able to predict what's going to come next in the lyrics. That's a bit boring.

So I decided to show the lyrics directly in a video.

It's impossible to capture my writing or typing the lyrics in real-time, so I made up my mind to make a simple stop motion animation.



At first, I tried to take pictures with the digital camera which was in my house, but I failed at it. I attached the camera to a microphone stand as a tripod with gum tape, but every time I pushed the shutter button, it moved a bit. That was very irritating.

So I started to use the webcam which was in my house. Then I could start shooting by clicking the trackpad of my MacBook Pro, without touching the camera.

However the picture I took with the web camera was blurry, so I had to buy a new web camera.



In regards to the editing software,
I found a nice freeware called FrameByFrame.
I was excited to try this new software. It worked well, because it could export the movie file when I was testing it.
However, a problem suddenly appeared.
When I tried to save the file as I was finished with half of the work, it froze. I tried again and again, but it didn't work.
I still don't know why, but FrameByFrame can't save more than a minute movie, at least for my environment.

I needed to find another way. I tried to do it with iPhoto and iMovie. They are good default applications that with Mac. However they didn't satisfy my need.

I googled and found that I had to buy iStopMotion 2.
Making a movie is so expensive...!
I used the trial version and well, it worked perfectly. I bought it.
When you pay money for something, it gives you back more than when you get something without paying. That's what I learnt from it.



Finally I succeeded in making the video made up of 1552 pictures.
I can explain the more details of the progression, but it will be too long to read.
So I won't do that. If you would like to know, you are welcomed to ask anything.

This is the picture of the lyrics sheet. The numbers are the accurate time when each word appears in the song. I had to check them all to synchronize the vocals with the picture.
The Japanese characters you can see in the picture show my practices.








Here are all the items used to make the video:

A MacBook Pro
A webcam
iStopMotion 2

iMovie (to combine the movie and the music)
Sunlight (I couldn't work when it was cloudy, because it was too dark to take a picture with my web camera.)
A desk lamp
A green notebook
Several pens
Time and patience (Honestly, I can't strongly say I want to do the same thing again, and I really respect animation creators. They are tough!)