Now for our latest video, the Nintendo DSi Disassembly. This stop-motion sequence shows one of these hot, new, hand-held gaming systems taking it's self out of the box and automatically disassembling. With the help of our lead game system technician, Ivan Villanueva, the DSi goes back together in record time, for the whole world to see.
Assembled from a thousand seprate photographs (or exactly 1,304 in this case), the animation process starts with me unboxing the device. I can get a little tricky with my photography here, making booklets seem to float by stacking them on unseen supports etc., because it's not very technical.
Once the disassembly segment begins, I soon require the expertise of a technician (basically, so that I don't break anything). Also, remembering the rotation and velocity of each animated part is hard enough without having to keep track of where all the screws and other parts go. (c; Unlike the process of an ordinary repair, during a stop-motion shoot, the technician is constantly interrupted as I ask them to pause so I can snap a frame, or give me a few minutes to animate parts leaving the field of view.
The reassembly scenes are shot in time-lapse style - partly because it's interesting to see but, mostly, because the tech and I are too fried to spend another 8 hours animating the parts coming back together. In fact, some of the earlier videos don't even have a reassembly sequence, for this very reason. However, after being inundated with requests to show the reassembly (in order to prove that the device still works) I decided that showing the skilled hands of the technician at work was the perfect way to finish this type of video.
After all of the frames are shot, I download them and process them all in photoshop to enhance the color and contrast. After that, I combine them into one huge, 1600x1200 pixel video, in Quicktime Pro, at 15 frames per second (an animation standard known as "shooting on twos," since there are 30 frames per second in video). Using a great Italian freeware program called MPEG Streamclip, I crop and resize the video down to widescreen, 720p HD (1280x720). From there, it's off to iMovie HD, where I add the titles, music and sound effects - the latter requiring hours of scrubbing, frame-by-frame to precisely place the sounds.
And that is how the TechRestore videos are made. Once again, I hope you enjoy the show and please let me know if you have any questions, comments or requests!
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