From the course: Learning Stop Motion Animation

Shooting with a tablet or smartphone

From the course: Learning Stop Motion Animation

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Shooting with a tablet or smartphone

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Now that you have a subject, let's get started with shooting. Chances are you have a camera pretty accessible. Maybe it's the droid phone in your pocket or you're an iPhone user. Totally doesn't matter. Both of these, great cameras. Chances are, though, if you've been using these devices, they've been in and out of your pocket, or you've had your hands all over em. It's a pretty good chance that it's smudged up. I find that as I'm using my phone, the camera often gets pretty dirty. Same holds true on a tablet. Now, with the tablets, the camera's keep getting better and better. You're going to find that newer generations of tablets have better cameras built in. But really, any camera's going to work for purposes of getting started with stop motion animation. What I want to make sure though, is that the camera is clean. So, get a nice soft cloth or a lens cleaning device and just gently rub out that lens. Make sure you don't have a giant fingerprint. As I'm browsing the Internet or reading comic books on my iPad, my hands get all over it. And what I want to make sure doesn't happen, is that there's not a lot of oil or a giant thumbprint on the back. So again, just gently wipe that off. Another thing you're going to want to be careful of, is the battery level. As you're shooting a bunch of photos over time, it's really easy for your device to lose power. There's really two solutions here. You can make sure that it's fully charged up before you start your shooting process. If not, consider tethering. You can take the power cable for your device, and plug it wall or into your computer. Just make that the device doesn't run down during the shooting day. The last thing you want to see happen is to be 85% through your masterpiece, and you suddenly lose power. All right. Now that you've got your device and it's clean, we're just about ready to shoot, but something you got to keep an eye on is keeping a stable shot. It's going to get really tiring if I have to stand here all day long holding my iPad, or my phone. So we're going to look for some easy techniques to stabilize the camera.

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