Life at the condo: And what a long slow process it is...

Ah, the ignorant me of three weeks ago, claiming we'd be up and running with our stop motion project that weekend. How crazy was that prediction? (Answer: Very, extremely, a lot.)

Alas, we persevered and today began filming. The Boinx iStopMotion software is super user-friendly. In a perfect world I'd have more control over lighting but, as Hen occasionally says, "you get what you get and you don't throw a fit."

Shooting went well, I think. Open the app, point the camera, and click many, many times. A box at the bottom right of the screen reminds you that 12 frames per second is what you should aim for. Every shot is tagged. You can edit out the frames you don't like. Today, we took 296 frames creating 24.08 seconds of awesome movie footage. I am hopeful our second day of shooting will be more successful now that we have a better understanding of how the process works.

You can add music and/or sound to the video. We plan on adding the Plants vs Zombies theme music to the video once we're done. I should probably note that per Hen's request we listened to that three-minute piece while we worked today. On repeat. Over and over and over again. The entire time.

We have to make a few more Shrinky Dink pieces so we can show the explosion when the zombie steps on the Potato Mine and for when we roll the credits.

For future reference, I originally tried to shoot against the north-facing wall but the light coming from the west created shadows that were way too dark so I had to shift our working area to the east. Also, we built a little stand out of LEGOs to hold the iPad Mini in place. Of course there were pictures...