set up, made the pillars, positioned everything, struggled with a camera and did a few tests

The pillars took me a while to build i wanted to be able to do it in the first go, so i did a few tests, took a few pictures, thought about the camera angles, the focus etc...

there was a lot to take into consideration. 

Making The Pillars - 

The pillars were a pain in the ass, at first we were going to make them 3D by building up squares silly us...

But then i thought, circles! - yeah thats better. So i started to make the circle pillars with temple like tops and tea bagged them like the book to make them blend in and look all old. At first we were gonna put some sort of symbol onto the tops of the pillars like the symbols in the book i'd drawn, but when it got to it and i set one of them up i decided that they looked better without them. Here's a pic of the pillars finished - 

Here's the pillar mock up's -

Set Up - 

I used a black sheet to cover up the surroundings then Luca can edit the animation in one of the shots. I got a lamp for the lighting and shadows. I put the lamp up top from a birds eye view so it would show every shadow from all the pillars, I think it worked pretty well. I set up all the pillars so they'd look like they were rising from angles and so it looked better than them rising just plain straight up. 

I found this vid great and I'm sure it could be very useful but i've been sat her

So first i looked at how to stop motion with an SLR - a youtube video i found of getting the best shutter speed and aperture. Here's the vid below...

I found this vid interesting and it would have been helpful if i was better at photography...

:/ I sat for 30 minutes trying to get it to focus properly and because he has a totally different camera to me i couldn't find where the buttons were he was saying! So tomorrow I'm gonna ask Matt to show me cause I'm crap.

At this point i figured out that zooming out to the fullest was the best way to keep things in focus so i just put the camera really close and took a few practise shots. 

Here's what i came out with, i thought of the different camera angles i could use or change to throughout the stop motion. 

I wanted to check if it would look good cutting the paper down, if it would actually look like a rising pillar.... and it did!
looked pretty good :)
So here's my test of the pillar rising.
From it i figured out that i need a tripod for the proper thing cause even though i tried you can totally tell that i moved loads taking each shot.