In the longshot of the Librarian asleep in his chair I had left a large black space on most of the screen. I intended this to be filled with a Library which would be digitally manipulated from my one bookcase.

I had taken many images of the bookshelf in the booth at different angles, closeness and focus. I then imported these images into photoshop and turned the bookcases parts into PNG's.

I then imported these alongside the footage in After FX and layered them on top of each other to create the illusion of a library. I had to be careful not to overlap the layers over the animated light change.

In the scene where the Librarian is climbing down the ladder to the book that has fallen to the floor the title of the book didn't show ver clearly on screen. I lightened it in After FX using the same mask process as I did with the rig removal just with a greatly lightened and edited clean image. I masked the writing on the spine to reveal the lightened writing below.

I moved into the booth today so I am able to start shooting, HURRAH!
I've been experimenting with the lighting presets on Stop motion pro to see if any will set the mood of the film better.

This is what the image looks like without a filter:

With filters:

Depending on the shot I will either use no filter or TUNGSTEN (bottom right image).

Time to set up my first shot....

I did an animation test of the puppet head with animatable eyebrows to see how it looks and moves on screen:

I didn't like it at all, it makes him look too comical. Moveable eyebrow idea scrapped!

I had made a few different prototypes of possible puppet heads for the librarian puppet. I particularly like two of these, the first is made of balsa wood, the second is a sculpey base which is then covered in a very fine foam layer with latex. I wanted to test how these would look under camera with lighting as I was unsure whether the features and detail and the heads would show up well enough on screen.

Here's how they looked:

I'm having a bit of a struggle at what one I liked more. I particularly liked working with the balsa wood, which is extremly light so isn't detrimental to the movement of the puppet and gives nice angular detail to the face; however I like the texture of the foam and book pages, but the head wa extremely heavy on the puppets long neck.

I think what I need to do now is try adding writing or book pages onto the balsa wood head and see what this looks like.