Story is about 3 Christmas decorations and their strange adventure. "Red" and "Green" pass on a white elephant gift (that they really don't want) to "Blue": it's a rock! Of course, it's not an ordinary rock... but I'll give away the story if I say more.

Some of you may remember my experiments trying to animate water some months back. I couldn't resist trying some of those techniques here. The still photo doesn't look near as impressive as the animated video.

This is the stage which measures 4 x 6 feet. The backdrop is a roll of white paper I bought for the first StopMo Jam. The "water" is from a cheap painter's dropcloth from Home Depot. The folds are evident from this angle but not from the camera. I wadded the plastic up to try to hide the creases. Hanging it up for several days didn't smooth them out, but since you can't see them in the final shot, who cares?

I lit the scene with one light - a tungsten Lowell Pro light with a 125W bulb. It is pretty tightly barndoored to keep too much light from hitting the "sky". The clouds are reflections from a sheet of acetate held on the gobo arm of a C stand. It can be manipulated to change the shape of the clouds but there is not enough control to attempt to animate them

And, yes, that is an old fashioned incident light meter on the corner of the table. Apparently there's some "discussion" about the need for such an instrument in the age of digital, but it has saved me countless hours setting up lights and lighting ratios.

All this is just setup. Now to get to the real work and resume animating!