Another long time with no post and this time I am back… Actually it has been some time since I started working on Chronos again but I wanted to post when I am ready. So, it is about time…

While I was away, we moved to a new house. I did not have a real room to shoot this film so I looked for a rental to make a studio. A cheap place, a barnhouse.. somewhere we can turn into a daytime studio for my film. But, we could not find it. Long story short, I decided to turn a little space here on the roof into a stopmo studio for shooting. This meant Chronos to be a different film. Such a small place for my actual set… It took a while for me to accept this idea. Changing scenario, shooting something else around the same idea… As a “dear friend” said -who has been very suppotive all through the hard times I was going through- maybe my film was born to be something else… Anyways… I have been working on scenario for the last two months. Papers of ideas, different scenarios… As a result there is no real scenario starting from the beginning and ending somewhere. Instead I have some scenes to shoot, to improvise if it is the right word. Actually this fits very well to the life itself. Life we spend in time! Now, there is no big clock. I removed it completely. I will have kush, tree and Adem. Will shoot each seperately and then put together later in the post. No blue screen. Just different scenes coming one after the other. I have some ideas to make it continuous but I will decide when shooting each. I will see how it will turn out. If it does not turn out well; I will be happy because I will leave with such a powerful experience of shooting a stop motion film for many years If it turns out well then I and maybe you will enjoy watching couple of minutes of stopmotion film. Both worth trying huh?

So, in this house now I have a space to make props, set, etc.. in the room where we do our web design work and I have a studio in the upstairs for shooting. The other day, while I was trying to setup lights I thought about the places I tried over the last 3 years. In the last 3 years, we moved 3 times. I started this film in a house and then we moved. In that second house, I moved all of my stuff in between different rooms 3 times. And we moved to another house -third one- last summer. This time, while I was settling down with all my stuff I felt really tired.. At the beginning of this film adventure I did not have many things like paints, lights, small and big things.. you know. But, over the time I collected a lot. Now I have many boxes filled with all different kinds of things. Now all settled down, ready to move forward. Ok, enough about my excuses…

Here are some pics of my new studio in the upstairs. There is not any nail on the walls here. To prevent humidity, we need to be careful about putting nails on the walls here. Wood pieces supported with other wood sticks making something like a cage. And lights, curtains are hanged on the wood sticks. It is such a small place but the best thing is it being totally seperated from the house. A spot just for animating. I am still working on setting up lights; just bought some new stuff to hang lights and fish lines to animate some little things, etc…

I will probably replace that green paper cone with a black one. It serves as a spot light. The barn door light you see in the middle is the one I made out of coke cans (by spray painting coke can metal sheets in black) and a garden light while I was working on The Invasion. My turning table is there as a set table and the farest distance my tripod can go is the place you see in the pictures. Not much room to get a real depth. But any problem can be solved huh?… I have a very flexible story to shoot so I can change things anytime I have a problem just like the first scene with a floor turning into a room with walls around. My next post is going to be about this soon.

While I was away I also finished working on The Invasion. Montage was finished and I sent all to my sister for her to do final touches and make the sound. I did not update that film’s blog either. Will post some pics of shooting and part of animation there too.

Two weeks ago there was a really serious flood here where we live. We were out of city for couple of days and it happened. Water was 2 meters high from the ground couple minutes away from our house. It was about 30 cm high here. Nothing happened to our house but many people lost their houses, offices, restaurants,.. I am so sorry for those people who are trying to recover… (Picture on the left is from the news on the net) The strange thing is the flood was very bad around the area I looked for the studio. If had found a place and turned it into a studio for my film and set everything there I would have lost all. My set, camera, lights, puppets.. were going to be all under the water. So, how would you call this? Fate maybe, maybe not… Again I am so sorry for all those people and I am grateful for not being able to rent a place in the fall past.

Edit: Adding this pictures to show the dept of field problem ( or shallow dept of field problem..) to Mike.

There are two additions to my stopmotion studio. A camera dolly and a turntable, both hand-driven and hand-made. I am going to start shooting the other film I am making with my sister soon. So, I needed these equipment now.

I will have 2 set tables for Chronos. One is going to be the main set table with tree, clock, etc.. And the other will be this turntable where I will shoot Adem away from “time” It will be a lot of fun shooting scenes over this turntable. I did a test shot yesterday for The Invasion and it works like a charm. Here how it looks:

TURNTABLE:

First of all I do not know if this thing is called as turntable in english. It is a set table which I can turn gradually. Anyways, turntable is in 71×104 cm dimentions. There was a rotary breakfast tray in our house we bought many years ago. We have never used that strange thing for breakfast. Things like turning a tray instead of saying -hey can you please hand me the olive- always seemed silly to me. Anyways this thing was in my studio for a long time helping a lot while painting props etc and finally it has found its real place. I mounted this thing to the hardboard piece and then mounted all to my set table. A needle pointer in front and a ruler over the table. That was it!

CAMERA DOLLY:

We (Hakan, me, Zeynep and Zeytin) assembled 2 curtain rods to an hardboard in 112×47 cm dimentions. Another 38×50 cm board goes on top of curtain rods for tripod table. We placed 2 nut washers and 2 nuts in between tripod table and curtain rods while keeping the top of the bolts inside rod rails. Another nut going on top of tripod table finished the installation. We adjusted the top of bolts to not to touch rail base. So, the tripod table can easily be moved by hand. Gradual movement is achived by a paper ruler I glued over the base board and a needle pointer on tripod table. There are small wood blocks mounted over tripod table to keep the tripod in place.

Before making this camera dolly I knew that there were other stop motionists using some wonderful camera dollies. These all gave me a lot of ideas about how to build a camera dolly. I wanted to make something very simple, hand-driven. If you like to check out some other ideas here are some URLs:

- Shelley’s Smoomoo

- Darkstrider’s camera equipment page

- Nick Hilligoss’s motor driven camera dolly

- Castlegardener’s camera dolly tutorial

- Tony’s camera dolly