Tabletop Studio!
Since moving into a new apartment in October, one of my goals has been to set up a space for tabletop shooting. I’ll often find myself with episodes focusing on an object I could film in a controlled setting which is often more efficient and looks better than doing something with motion graphics.
At the last place I was living I had a very barebones version of this set up: a table in the corner of the basement with some black or white backdrop and some janky lights.
It was cramped and awkward but it got me through some successful shoots: snail shells, ammonites, skunk cabbage spadix...es.
I’ve finally gotten to start using the ‘studio’ I set up in the new place. The first two objects to get their red carpet moment are: a AAA battery (you’ll see…) and a swan feather.
My basic setup is to have the object in question on an old junky photo tripod, that lets me adjust its height and rotation easily. Rigging it so it just sits where I want it has been one of the major headaches. The swan feather wasn’t so bad: I built a little base mount out of sticky tack and that was enough to keep it held up.
The AAA battery was much harder. Eventually it required glue-gunning a metal wire up the back of the battery, and bending that wire underneath the battery to create a kind of coil base that I tamped down with sticky tack and bent back and forth until it kept the battery (close enough to) vertical. I’m sure if I talked to some stop motion animators - and I even know a lot of stop motion animators - they’d be able to tell me a hundred easier ways to do this.
I also bought a bunch of bristol board colours and black and white foam core that I can tack up to the wall behind the table for various backdrops. And I saved some styrofoam blocks from a delivery to serve as bases I can stick wire / objects into if I need it - though then balancing the blocks on the tripod is a different issue.
For something like the swan feather, I’m also making off-label usage of a Syrp Genie Mini, a simple motion control puck that just does rotation. It’s supposed to be for a camera, but I can very conveniently use it as a little turntable, controllable from my phone, to have things like the feather smoothly rotate 360 (or any other arbitrary amount).
90% of the time I’m lighting with two Neewer LED panels in some combination. They’re perfectly serviceable little lights, lightweight and able to run for a decent amount of time off their internal batteries. Having panels is also nice because with smaller objects I can put the lights right behind them for a blown out, glowing background.
To do light sweeps, which I rely on pretty routinely I’ll either rely on my phone’s flashlight for smaller objects or a donated Neweer light wand which has a ton of bells and whistles, colours and modes, but which I use almost exclusively at ‘constant, 5600k’.
Don't you worry, I'm gonna get rid of that wire before this ever shows up in an episode.
My camera itself is sitting on an old Manfrotto 501 tripod with a 504 head, which made more sense when my primary camera was big and heavy. Since I’ve switched to a lightweight tripod this one has been mostly gathering dust so it’s nice to have a use for it. And the fluid head is still as fluid as ever.
Best of all I now have the room I need to be able to leave most of this stuff up and at the ready so I’m not building the whole setup each time. Whenever I have an object that needs shooting, I can mount the camera, slap the object on the photo tripod or Syrp (plus or minus glue, tape, wire, sticky tack, hope, prayer) and be ready to go. I’m looking forward to this encouraging a lot more close inspection of objects that pop up in episodes. I love my macro lens and being able to shoot extreme close ups in this controlled environment with deliberate lighting always gives cool results. So look out for, so far, a battery and a feather when these episodes start appearing.