Never Stop Cycling

My thesis film is here! Hope you enjoy it.



Never Stop Cycling from Colin Lepper on Vimeo.

Behind the Scenes

More significant and in depth posts are coming (props and sets), but it's been too long since an update, so here are some behind the scenes shots I took with my phone, some of my lighting set ups I was particularly proud of... and/or needed the photo to reference where I put them. I had NO experience with lighting prior to starting this film so it's been a ton of fun figuring it out and learning as I go.

Lighting got pretty damn precise during some scenes, I used this cone to put a spot just on a portion of my character's chest to lighten up a shadow. If I did it right no one will notice... and I couldn't have this setup go unseen!

I love the "anything goes" mentality of stop motion, you can see my little flash light being anchored down with a little vaseline bottle to get just a bit of light on those foreground elements.

Definitely the most complex shot of my film, it involved a walk throughout the shot as the camera moved on 3 different axis with the focus changing, and then as the forest is revealed, an average of about 5-10 mouth shapes were swapped each frame. Definitely am proud of how it turned out though!

The last day of shooting my "room" set. You can see the container holding the "small" mouths for the trees. There will be more on those weird trees soon...

Just a really serious down shot, had to attach a mirror to the salon to read the numbers for the camera pan.

Coming Soon!

Projectorcycle

Here you can see what is one of the most important props in the film, the projector-stationary-bike thing. I'm really happy with how it turned out, and it only really took a couple days, all be it... long... long days. The light bulb in this photo is temporary, the light bulb in the final film is an eyeball, but it will be made too look much better than this crudely drawn sharpie one.

I wish I took earlier progress photos, but here you can see the individual parts, almost everything is made of cardboard and vinyl tubing found at home depot, with a few sculpy pieces as well. You can also see the LED light that I have running through the bike's frame.

here you can see the bike constructed, with sculpy details added on. It's already got a layer of paint, but this was right before the final coat, so you can see some parts have been masked off. I found this awesome paint at Walmart that gives the effect of hammered metal, which was perfect for what I wanted.

Some gel texture paint and dry brush was added to give it a more worn, rustic metal look...

The film reel wheel was spray painted with a plastic spray paint then dry brushed to give it those scratch like looks. Still need to add the film on this reel though. Both the front and back wheel rotate as well.

The pedals are bits of sculpy with magnets inside them, so they will stick to the puppets feet. They also rotate at all the points a normal bike pedal would. You can also see the wiring coming out of the back of the bike here, this will be hidden in the final film.

The seat is made of foam and fake leather, that's been scratched and sanded to make it look worn out.

And there you have it! One projector bicycle.