Charlotte Blacker has made a video clip for a very catchy tune – “Pretty Crabby”
We’ve always used Stop Motion Pro and find it very intuitive and user friendly. Everything you do saves automatically so your work is safe.
– Charlotte Blacker
Tell us about yourselves please!
Good Cop Bad Cop Productions are Charlotte Blacker and Mark Taylor of Wakefield, West Yorkshire. One an award winning animator and lover of all things wool who cut her teeth working at Loose Moose Productions, London before going freelance; the other a glutton for punishment, creative enabler, aspiring animator and model maker. Together we formed as super duo Good Cop Bad Cop Productions. We’ll leave it to you to decide which is which.
Where can we see your work?
Our most recent production is Pretty Crabby, a music video for Caspar Babypants (Chris Ballew of Presidents of the United States of America fame). You can find Pretty Crabby on youtube and our website along with our other films. It’s been shown at Seattle International Children’s Film Festival and Bay Area Children’s Film Festival amongst others. We’ve also completed a promo for Long Division 2014 that includes a knitted Godzilla. We have also been working on a pilot for a children’s series
What hardware do you use to make your films?
We have a studio in Unity Works, Wakefield. Our set up is fairly simple; we have built a stage to animate on with a green screen secured to beams behind it. We have a set of studio lights and various pieces for armatures, rigs etc. We also use a rostrum for animating flat characters and backgrounds that are then ready to place in compositions using Adobe After Effects. We currently use a Cannon 500D camera with live view.
How do you use Stop Motion Pro?
We’ve always used Stop Motion Pro and find it very intuitive and user friendly. Everything you do saves automatically so your work is safe.
Previous saved shots are easy to find and if you have to edit anything in SMP program, add additional frames etc it is very easy to do so.
Viewing stored hi-res images before exporting is vital, the sharpness of the image is important as our sets are mainly wool. We use onion skinning but prefer to use space key to flip between the live view and the previous image to get a feel for the action. We use the drawing tool to plot positions and boundaries for our characters, we use this with our green screen when our characters have to react to an object that is to be shot separately. ?
So, what’s your next challenge?
We’ve been very busy setting up the business and are currently working to get our website up and running as well as boring admin stuff. Exciting things are happening too though. We are about to start work on a new music video which we’re very excited about. Also with the same artist some inserts for their web series. We have a couple of other jobs in the pipeline with some personal projects too.
https://www.goodcopbadcopproductions.com/