Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
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Thanks for the feedback! I'll try diffusing the lamp (I'm usually to lazy to do it, but it's usually worth it) which should also have the effect of darkening it in relation to the led's.
What is grueling? I'm not familiar with a lot of building techniques...
Sorry, it looks like the dreaded auto-correct changed it without me noticing, as I meant to say greebling (which in case you didn't know what that is it's basically adding lots of mechanical/sci-fi looking detail - a term that I believe was first used in the making of Star Wars). Here is the definition of Wikipedia.
Here is an example from a lego set:
Last edited by Dragon Brick Studios (July 11, 2017 (05:03am))
oh, greebling is something I like to do when I draw spaceships and tech stuff.
Hehe, makes more sense now. While I think I won't apply greebling to this particular set (I want it to be rather minimalist for the sake of the story), I'll keep it in mind for the future.
I know something is wrong with this, but I can't quite figure it out. I use the Logitech c920, so I know that it could look a lot better than this. What am I missing? 
personally, I think if you had space in front of the truck and had the horizion in the middle of the frame so the camera is not looking down....if at all possible....
Same as what cooked cat said, and also a couple of things that slightly bug me is a little gap of the table on the far left over the other side of the white wall and the crack between the roof of the house and the wall. These can probably be fixed by changing the position of the webcam as mentioned above though 
Yes, I also saw those things, but I would like to know what is wrong with lighting, focus, things camera related etc, not necessarily set design. Thank you for your thoughts though!
"personally, I think if you had space in front of the truck and had the horizion in the middle of the frame so the camera is not looking down....if at all possible...."
That's exactly what he told you here.
The main problem is the composition, its just a camera pointing down at the truck, directly parallel to it.... Experiment with some more interesting angles etc to make the shot more interesting.
The lighting is fine, but quite flat, and the focus is fine.
I recommend distancing the set a little from the background. You can see a shadow of the tree in the sky at the top left of the frame. Try moving the set a little forward/push the sky back, so that there's a distance between the two, and also experiment with light angles, to remove any shadowing, and the illusion of depth will be a lot better.
Okay, so this isn't technically a frame from any sort of upcoming project, but I was wondering what you think of it. I am mainly looking for your thoughts on the camera settings on the left, not on the set design. (This is just a test frame after all.) This is from the logitech c920 camera. How can I optimize how this frame looks in quality?
Its a bit hard to say as it will be very subjective. For one; We do not know whether the scene is meant to represet, day, evening or even possibly night. The image is also rather small to judge properly on it. I do see harsh shadows so I would say for one, soften the light thats above the figs. It'll help kill / lower the intensity of the shadows.
Two; this is purely a critique on the Pic. The framing lacks depth of any sort. For one, its not great composition. You've got a lot of dead space to the far left, and the house on the right is pretty much cut out. I would suggest framing closer to the foreground, and possibly even angling it. To give it a more pleasing view and to kill the dead space.
-Divine.
Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough. 
Regarding what you said about softening the lights, does that mean I should bring my lamps farther away from the set?
Last edited by Raptor Studios (February 16, 2018 (08:30am))
I'd say yeah bring them farther away, the sky has a definite hot spot in the middle, which gives it away that there's a light there. Moving the lights farther should help make the lighting more even.
When I move the lights away, things get dimmer. Should I turn up the exposure?
Yeah, in fact some cameras (cough cough c920) have a problem with the rolling shutter causing sort of a wavy flicker, and upping the exposure seems to help solve this. Something to do with auto shutter speed compensating for exposure? Also you probably don't want to up the gain, because that adds noise. I'm sure Rioforce can explain it better, this is just what I'm finding works for me.
I don't think the light flicker has anything to do with rolling shutter, as most of the DSLR's if not all the ones we use will have rolling shutter. You'll find the more expensive ones (up the 8k mark like the RED, ARRI, PANAVISION & BMUMP) will have global shutter.
I think what you're referring to, and please correct me if I'm wrong is the shutter speed. Now depending on what lights you have (whether they're 50Hz or 60Hz) it's a simple fix of changing your shutter speed to 1/50 or 1/60. Because these are frames only, you can in theory go up to any amount as long as the shutter is in tack to the lights hertz.
Now I don't remember if C920 has shutter speed selection. If not, make sure anti-flicker is turned off in the pic above it doesn't look like the case. And just adjust the exposure accordingly. If you have another light that'd be preferable. Or even something to just bounce the light to, like something silver / reflective or white foam.
It's really a trial and error bud, I wish you well.
-Divine.
Yeah, I'm not sure on the technical stuff. What I'm referring to is not exactly flicker per say, but the weird sort of stripy banding, which I was under the impression had to do with the flicker of the light over the time it takes for the shutter to roll from top to bottom (or is it bottom to top?) Anyway, I've noticed some weird stuff with rolling shutter on C920, like if a figure starts to fall over while shooting there will be a horizontal line, and everything below that line doesn't line up with the parts above. Something I've never encountered with a DSLR.
As far as I know there's no shutter speed control on the C920, which is why the trick seems to be using a higher exposure to trick the shutter speed into compensating and doing what you want it to do. I'm currently using an ND filter and a polarizer to darken the scene enough to allow for the higher eposure, and that seems to get rid of that nasty banding.
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