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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hello, i was wondering if the standard 18-55mm lens is good for brick filming, or if you would need a macro lens instead.
Huh? We just normally use webcams.
unlike some, mudblood, my father can afford the best.
no jk i hate webcam quality, im using a compact atm and wanna upgrade
Should be alright. Just get the camera back far enough so you can get the 18-55 to focus. Remember, the extended focal length will give you a nice shall DOF, and depending on the lens you should have a nice creamy bokeh too. 
To shoot with an SLR you need to understand a few things. An SLR was not designed to have a repeatable shutter or appeture. Each time you take a shoot, the exposure duration will be somewhat different as well as the appeture. For a photographer these changes are insignificant. For a SMA these will introduce horrible flicker.
The solution is to use a fully manual lens and use long exposure times. The fully manual lens will prevent the CPU in the camera from adjusting anything between shors. Even then, you need to make a modification to the lens. The tab on the lens that controls the appeture must be removed to prevent the camera from playing with the aperture. As you take a picture, the camera lets the iris close to the proper f-stop before taking the shot. It then opens is back up to let lots of light into the view finder. This action is not repeatable and must be disabled. Make sure the SLR you buy has a fully manual lens (around 50mm) available for it.
The other solution to flicker is to take very long exposures. The small errors in exposure times will become a smaller percent of the exposure and become less noticable. SMA experts often will take a 2-5 second exposure.
Another issue with an SLR is that the shutter is not designed for tens of thousands of releases. You may very well wear the shutter out making a few SMA films.
The last issue is that of a preview. Webcams provide a video feed that can be used for onionskinning and preview. The average SLR does not. Some SMA people add a small spy video camera to the view finder. This is complicated in that you have to use the proper lens. Some SLR cameras now come with a built in preview, but you need to find out if that preview is available as an output from the camera. Most are not; they just feed the LCD and do not make it off the camera.
I have shot one movie with an SLR (D50 with a 50mm fully manual lens modified to remore the DOF control). The quality was great and the extra wide field of view allowed me to crop and pan in post production rather than during shooting.
Best of luck.
An SLR was not designed to have a repeatable shutter or appeture.
isn't that what the manual mode was designed for? even if the camera does not like using the same shutter and aperture, if it stays the same how would the light flicker? i cant remember which movie it was but someone used a nikon d40 for their brickfilm and it was fine, i'm not sure if he adjusted his lens as you describe...
what do you mean by SMA? is that the stop motion program? if there was a 5 second shutter release with studio lighting the camera would have to be set to ridiculously low aperture, ash said the lens would give nice shallow DOF
i don't agree when you say that SLR's are not designed for thousands of shutter releases, sports photographers would fire thousands of shots rapid fire.
at the moment i use a compact with no onion skinning or preview so i can deal with that...
thanks for the detailed response though
SMA - stop motion animation.
For a five second exposure you need much less light than what the average webcam filmer uses. For a QC4000 you need as much light as possible. For an SLR, room light is more than adequate with the lens stopped way down. This has the effect of increasing the DOF. If you want a tight DOF, you will need to reduce the amount of light and/or decrease the shutter duration. I found that a one second exposure was plenty to reduce flicker.
Manual mode simply tells the SLR that the human will set the exposure and not calculate it itself. But even in manual mode the accuracy and repeatability of the shutter system is not perfect. You ask for a 1/64th of a second exposure, you might get that plus or minus 1/500 of a second. Does not sound like much difference, but it does cause flicker.
The same is true for the iris (apeture) control. (Actualy the iris control is much worst.) It is not repeatable and will cause flicker. This is why you either need an SLR with a lockable DOF preview or a way to prevent the camera from controling the iris. For a Nikon this is as simple as not twisting the lens bayonet all the way till it locks. Not sure about other makes.
If you don't care about flicker than you need not worry about the above. But if even the smallest amount of flicker drives you nuts (it does for me) than you need to pay attention to these details. I ran numerous tests where I would shoot the same frame once every other second for several hours and then look at the results. Only when I got this not to flicker was I ready to film a movie. You learn lots of issues (never put a computer monitor close to your set, always wear dark cloths, block out the light from windows, ...) when running this test!
True a very high end sports SLR has a shutter good for 500,000 releases or more. But your lower end models (under $2K) will have a garantee for something around 100,000. At 15 fps that is about 110 minutes of filming. Certainly plenty for the average 60 second short but still rather punishing.
For more information go read the forums at www.stopmotionanimation.com
Last edited by FLL-Freak (January 6, 2009 (07:00am))
Right, as far as I know, an f8 is an f8 no matter what. I don't see how that is none repeatable. In fact, looking into the aperture of my rangefinder, I've set different apertures and Im getting very consistent results at different stops. An f8, is f8 sized, an f1.4 is f.14 sized etc... The flicker would be hardly noticable. As is shutter speed. IIRC using a fully manual lens wont really make much difference to using a standard AF lens put in manual. Frame averaging is always a bonus though.
As to shutter cycles, that is a genuine problem. I personally have never worn a shutter out (I have a 30 year old rangefinder that must have fired thousands and thousands, and that still works. Well, it would if it hadn't had an oil leak...), and my DSLR has fired a good few thousand off. At least 20,000 I think, and that's in a year. But it is true that shutters are only rated for a few hundred thousand cycles. And shutters are expensive. So keep that in mind. A long exposure is possibly an answer to the minute errors in timing, but then you have the problem of using a smaller aperture (by the way, remember aperture - f1 = wide = narrow DOF, f22 = tiny = huge DOF).
As to DOF, a wider aperture will give a shallower DOF, as will a longer focal length. Reducing shutter speed alone will not create a narrower DOF. Only the Aperture and Focal Length.
A preview is a non issue, look through the viewfinder. It's true you wont see the DOF, but you can always take a DOF preview shot which isn't saved to the card before you start shooting a scene.
Basically, give it a quick go to see what happens. But use fully manual mode. Always.
I use a 18-55mm lence and it works for me 
EDIT: I use a Canon EOS 1000D btw.
Last edited by Antifaan (January 6, 2009 (08:45am))
Right, as far as I know, an f8 is an f8 no matter what. I don't see how that is not repeatable.
On most SLR and DSLR cameras, the body commands the lens iris fully open between shots. This is to allow lots of light into the viewfinder and into your eye so you can see better. Only when you press the shutter release does the body tell the iris to close down to the proper f-stop. After it waits a while for this mechanical action to happen will it open the shutter to take your picture.
This closing up of the iris is what CAN lead to flicker. If the delay is not long enough the iris may not be in its final position before the shutter opens. It may alow happen that the iris bounces slightly as it closes. Your lens may also have a sticky iris and may not in proper position. In any case, the moving iris can lead to flicker.
As mentioned before the simple solution is to prevent the body from controlling the iris. This can be done by locking down the DOF preview or by adjusting the lens in such a way that the body can't control the iris. Some people cut the iris control tab off the lens. Others (like me) simply do not lock the lens fully into place.
My experiments show that a small amount of flicker is indeed introduced by the iris moving. My flicker went away when I prevented the body from controlling the iris.
As far as using an AF lens set to auto, you probably can get away with it. Many AF lenses have lots of play in the focus and zoom controls for my tastes. A slight jiggle and those controls can change. My non zoom 50mm lens has a very stiff focus ring that prevents any changes. Set with simple room lights and a one second exposure I get a large DOF that I like. If you want a smaller DOF than by all means open up the iris and lower the exposure time (but you MIGHT introduce a bit of flicker).
I think we are all saying the same thing. An SLR can be a way to go. You just have to understand your camera and what it can and can't do for you. Since an SLR was not designed for SMA work, it does have some drawbacks (that we have discussed) that must be accounted for.
I have made movies with a QC4000 (yuck), a miniDV camcorder, and a DSLR. If I were making another movie I would likely use the camcorder for the bulk of the work. It is smaller and provided a live preview for smooth animation. But if I had a scene I needed to move the camera in, I would shot wide with the SLR and crop/pan/zoom in post ala Ken Burns.
Last edited by FLL-Freak (January 6, 2009 (11:25am))
well i was going to get an slr for photography so i thought i may as well use it for brickfilms, lighting flicker was been a big problem for my compact camera even with fully manual, but i'd rather use that than my grainy gritty webcam!
I just shot a walking test with my fathers Sony Alpha A100 (10 meg Digital SLR) a few days ago. He has a remote shutter release and i shot it at 10 meg, in full manual mode at F32 with a 3.2 second shutter. As always i had about 35 lbs of weights mounted on my tripod, and it turned out beautifully. I plan on using this setup for my current project. His lens in an 18-70 and has a minimum focal distance of about 4ish inches. In my testing i found the macro feature to be totally worthless when trying to frame up a mini figs face.
After a lot of testing i decided to use a standards DV 4:3 template in premier and AE and just add my own letter box for a wide screen feel. I contemplated doing it at 1080 and even converted my walking test to 1080 to take a look at it, but since i don't have a bluray burner and the main viewing audience is online i decided that standard DV will work fine. Also i decided to stay in DV because as said above i cant shoot my closeups and extreme close ups live, however sense i'm shooting at 10 meg my pixel resolution is about 3872-by-2592, and since DV is 720 x 480 this allows me to digitally push in for tighter shots with no quality loss.
When i shot my last film (mass media in a changing world) i used an old Digital 8 camera going firewire to Animator DV so i was able to use onion skinning, and i'm not going to lie, it was handy (that was my first film with animator dv and onion skinning) however, i don't think its necessarily a reason to not go DSLR. For my test i was able to connect the Alpha with a USB to Composite (rca) cable to my television and after it captured each frame it displayed it on the television. Which i found to be helpful in insuring that the shot cam out clearly and as desired.
In concussion, It is my personal belief that it comes down to what works for you and what you have available, I've never been very happy with the quality of my Digital 8 shot films (although mass media looks far better on youtube than i ever could have hoped for) so to me losing onion skinning to gain a resolution of 3872-by-2592 is a simple decision. Stop motion is a tiresome lengthy hobby no matter how you do it. I've had to re shoot things i shot with and without onion skinning over the years. So my advice is to just try it out and see how it works for you.
Good luck.
Happy Animating.
-Jeremy
thanks for that
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