This is the behind the scenes of the Martin Luther Playmobil animation
Polystyrene was used to make the sets. The polystyrene is easy to cut with a
hot wire cutter, you can shape it into objects like mountains and bridges.
After the basic layout is made from polystyrene and glued down to the base
then plaster bandage is used to hold the polystyrene together and to give the
landscape a more realistic look.
When the plaster is set poly filler is then used
to cover over the holes in the bandage. This can then be sanded down later.
Then it's a matter of painting the sets, it's worth adding sand into the paint to give
a more realistic texture.
And then when it's dry add things like stones or fake grass.
The animation stage has curved edges.
This is because a photo of a corner would shows shadows badly
but instead if you have a curve at the back
then the sky will look more realistic in photos, because it's harder to notice the curved corner.
This is the animation stage behind me, what I do is set up the characters just how I want them
the camera and the lights, take a test photo,
and maybe change some of the settings in the lights or the camera
but when I'm happy with it I'll take some glue, glue objects down to the set that I don't want to move
and then it's case of taking the first photo, making small minute adjustments,
Taking another photo and then re-doing that process over and over again.
Typically for a three to five second clip I'll have taken between 80 - 100 photos.
And for the whole four minute animation you're watching through over 4,000 photos.
Here's some examples of the individual photos.
This is a program called Lightroom this is where I collect together all of the photos
from the different scenes.
Here's the thunderstorm scene where Luther's horse
runs away and he's scared that he's going to get struck by lightning.
This is one of the photos as I click through you can see how the characters move a small
fraction each time then when it's played through it gives the illusion of motion.
Now the obvious problem with this clip is that you can see the rig the wire and
the blu-tack that was used to hold the horse and
Luther up in the air so to get rid of these I head into another program
Photoshop here I've got two layers the top layer is the photo that I took with the rig in.
The bottom layer is another photo of the scene without any
characters but with the exact same lighting and the same camera settings
then I use the erase tool set the brush to an appropriate side then in the top
layer rub out any part where the rig is visible as I do that the image from the
photo below comes through to replace the rig.
When I'm happy with the photo, export it as a JPEG
and then move on to the next image. It's pretty slow work and the
finished clip looks like this.
Once the individual photos are graded and colored
they're exported as JPEGs and then imported into Premiere Pro which is a
video editing software
And this is what the timeline for the finished video looks like
here's the different visual clips that build up the animation and
here's the sound effects things like horses galloping or the sound of water.
and also this is the music.
That's some of how the video was put together,
now our hope from making this Martin Luther animation is that people would get
excited about the same things that gripped Luther from the Bible and that
they would see that the gospel impacts lives today.
So please do share the animation
with friends and neighbors and colleagues and if you'd like to show it
in your church or children's group or youth group or at school it can be
downloaded free from www.GoChatterVideos.com
you