Lighting in Stop Motion

The mashine on top of the monitor is called lunchbox and used to record the single frames.

The lamp from underneath only shines on the background and is mainly used to avoid unwanted shadows on it. I used a paper blind which creates soft light. More opposed to the main top light which is so strong and hot that you can only touch it with gloves, the light from underneath is a weeker lamp.

The top lamps don't shine directly on the character as the light would be too strong and just create far too bright, blinding colours. So we used either polystrene boards or transparent blinds to dim and control the strenght of the light. For the top light I chose a polystrene board which is used for reflecting the light. Changing the position and angle of the boards leads to different direction and intencities of the light. With more than one polystrene board you can reflect the light several times which is used to create almost no shadows on the puppet no matter in which direction it is facing.

For this set I used one lamp from the top to shine on the character and one light from underneath the table to avoid unpleasant shadows on the background.

29th June 2010: In this lecture we learned how to set up good lighting.