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NZ Macguide Issue 6

Phil Gregory is an Auckland sculptor who has worked in TV and film for the last seven years; including props for Xena, Young Hercules, and production design for Imagination Television, the Pitts/Warren short film Trust Me and the yet-to-be-released Harold Brophy feature film Orphans and Angels.

His partner, Kathleen Anderson, is a script writer and story editor (also in television), and so the family - with three children - bought a second-hand, clunky great Mac Portable for scriptwriting and a few games. Phil didn't have much use for it himself.

However, the bug must have caught as, a couple of years after its demise, the household bought a brand new Blueberry ('SL') slot-loading iMac, which has since had its RAM increased to 320Mb and its hard drive replaced with a 40 gig. This machine had more appeal so, armed with iMac For Dummies, Phil set about making himself computer literate.

In stop motion, you change a characters' expression by swapping heads between still shots

Meanwhile, he was making props for Xena, and he started building a mini set and some puppets in downtime, with the support and encouragement of his boss (better word?). He wasn't really sure where this would lead, but Phil's not the sort to sit around idly when there's nothing to do.

Imagin' all the people
With an old CD of Photoshop bought second-hand, Phil started wondering if stop-frame animation could be achieved digitally. He'd made a few sweeps of his little set with a video camera over at Xena, but this didn't give him the control and movement he desired. After Xena finished, the acquisition of handy 2.1 megapixel Samsung Digimax 210 camera and the viewing of a colleague's Adobe Premiere in action completed the picture; between jobs Phil started developing a script and shooting with the camera plugged into a wall socket for power and downloading directly into the family iMac via USB.

This was all strictly limited, front room stuff - the camera is not particularly high resolution and there's no control of focus or even white-point, but Phil resolved these issues(or something), eventually making a 3 minute show reel mastered on his colleagues version of Premiere 6 (which he found very intuitive to use, or something like that. If we say some thing nice they 're less likely to sue.)

The show reel, A Quiet Night In, has been mastered into QuickTime and is an absolute joy to behold. It's a science fiction meets morose New Zealand Kiwi suburbanite, complete with voices and sound. With this as a show reel, Phil is hoping to gain funding to create a full, theatre quality production. Let's hope he gets the funding - if he can make this with equipment verging on domestic appliances, there's no telling what he could do with dedicated equipment.

Quiet on the set! Nails, take four....	The space-ship set

© Parkside Media 2002
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