We all recall the Christmas special Rudolph the Red–Nosed Reindeer. That unique style of animation still holds a place in our memories. Whether it is a new Aardman Animation, Tim Burton film, or the latest Diet Dr. Pepper spot, stop-motion animation has a look that is hard to ignore.

Visually Stunning

The stop-motion animated tale Mythic Journeys: The Bone Orchard was shot over a 9 month period using the Nikon D300 still camera. It was shot at a setting of about 4K, with about 5-7 seconds of animation per day. They chose to animate and shoot at 30 fps which helped give the characters a smoother style of movement. When ROUSH Media had the opportunity to provide post-production services on the film Mythic Journeys: The Bone Orchard, we jumped at the chance. To reduce costs, Mythic Journeys and ROUSH Media devised a workflow for a long and tedious post that allowed Mythic Journeys to do much of the post themselves. Using After Effects to frame, resize, & crop the huge images, they created RGB 4:4:4 uncompressed files. DV QuickTime proxies with the same names and meta data of the High-Res media was created and allowed editing to be done on inexpensive Final Cut Pro workstations.

Finding Solutions

One hurdle that had to be overcome was the issue of flickering clips due to a subtle variance in lighting which occurs over the time span of shooting—a frequent problem with stop-motion. Using AE plug-ins and a very talented After Effects artist, they were able to remove or reduce most of the flicker.

Once the conform was done, Senior Colorist Keith Roush worked with Steven Boe, one of the producers of the film, and his DP, Armando Salas, to enhance the look of the film with extensive DI color grading. On some shots, there were close to 9 layers with tracking shapes which created stunning images. 

Files were delivered back to Mythic Journeys, the client, who then utilized After Effects and Apple Motion for the final atmosphere and FX elements. ROUSH Media then reconformed and mastered it.

The Bone Orchard is part of the feature length documentary Mythic Journeys produced by Steven & Whitney Boe of Imaginal Cells FilmWorks. www.MythMovie.net