I created Quoll by an extremely laborious process. Lesson learnt. Don’t do it this way.

I filmed the whole thing on my miniDV handicam set up on a small tripod. I had some lights set up. I then moved my hand in and out of the frame to move the tiles and quoll. After importing, I used iMovie08 (didn’t have FCP at the time) to mark the film as good (no hand in shot) or bad (hand in shot). Then I selected approximately 0.1 second of each good shot and put that all together.

Stupidly I hadn’t set my focus to manual so every time I moved my hand in and out and the light was slightly changed as the camera sought focus. That meant that I had to be careful about getting the good (focused, solid light) good (no hand in shot) footage. Unfortunately, I didn’t realise this till I was about half way through. The flicking of the light was a little annoying and a friend suggested that turning it black and white would reduce the problem.

This one minute film took about 10 hours to make. But that is how I learn. By doing. Painful though it may be.