I See Faces - Pepper

I decided to experiment with lens for this gif. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to achieve with this so I went ahead and set up my camera and set up each of the frames to match up to my storyboard drawings. This proved more challenging than I expected it would be as I had to deal with lighting issues, the pepper losing its balance and not staying in position for long enough for the photo to be taken. I tried using blue tack and Sellotape to keep the pepper in place in some frames.

These are a few of the photos I took - I am not really happy with the look of them at this stage but I will see what I can do with them on Photoshop. The issue was that by the time I realised the lighting and settings on my camera probably need to be changed, I had already cut into the pepper so I was unable to start again. 

I had tried to keep the pepper and my camera in steady positions whilst doing my photographs but the pepper kept falling over and the camera got nudged a couple of times which meant that the pepper wasn't in the same place in the photograph in all of my images. It was a challenge getting them to line up so it didn't look like it had moved drastically between frames so I used a brush on Photoshop to make this rough outline which I could then use as a guide for positioning the pepper in each frame. 

I played around with the timings on each frame and speeded up some of the closeup shots to make it look more agitated and dramatic. I like the imperfect transitions between frames because I think it puts the viewer more on edge and adds to the humour of the situation. I don't like how the line between the wall and the work surface changes so much - I am going to remove the background from each of the frames and see how I feel about the animation then. 

After removing the background, I think the gif instantly looks more refreshing and clean. I need to adjust the levels and colours of the images because I haven't altered them at all yet and the flesh inside the pepper looks to orange when it should be white. I think I could have taken better photos if I had thought more about lighting in the early stages. The photographs were taken in the evening so there was no natural light and I was using a desk lamp as my main light source. In hindsight, I probably should have taken the photos in natural daylight so the colours in the image would have been more accurate. 

Working from reference in my initial ideas sketches, the faces in the peppers look scared/shocked. However, I think my photographs at this stage make the character inside the pepper look angry rather than scared, I think this is because of the shape of the mouth. Next, I am going to use Photoshop to alter the eyes to make him seem even more angry.