Walter Benson wrote:How long was the exposure on some of those shots?
For the Pumpkin's lair, as with Odoriferous, I had to do a one second exposure, which was especially annoying since I duck down under the table for every frame. This made animation take a lot longer.
I had to because the central element of lighting was the glowing vat of orange potion, which was lit by an iPhone screen. Despite having it at maximum brightness, it was still relatively dim. Also, as in Odoriferous, I had one of my lamps shined at a wooden log cabin wall to warm its light up slightly and dim it significantly to add a slight bit of extra light. For this film specifically though, I had a piece of orange paper above the set which has an LED flashlight shining at it. This provides most of the light not from the vat of potion and reflects off of the Pumpkin's hat. I also had the glass with a flashlight shining through it which added a sparkle onto certain parts of the set. I particularly liked it when some of the potions on tables near the walls were in the foreground with some light from the window sparkling off of them.
For another shot, though, I used a two second exposure. I forgot which one that was, though (it might have been the one with the glowing potion pot).
For the shot of the potion lighting up and then going out, I had the same light lighting up the potion but took a picture of that glowing potion with every exposure setting on my camera betwixt 1 1000th of a second and 30 seconds. I have to manually adjust the settings on the camera itself so I had to be horribly careful not to bump the camera as I adjusted the exposure every frame. Towards the end I also had to wait a really long time, but I managed to get it in one take.
This shot ended up being a little too long, so I took out half the frames to make it light up faster, and then took those cut frames and placed them in reversed order on the other end to make it fade out.
One of the things I really like about that shot is you can see how the light looks at so many different levels and how they all make the potion look different, but all together they work splendidly sequentially.