All the eggs except the singing eggs were made from sculpey and fimo polymer clay. The white sculpey that most of the eggs were made from was Sculpey original, but this is actually very hard to work with as it is so soft. We also used some Sculpey Studio for the egg yolk colour, again this was very soft. Although okay for making the egg yolks, I wouldn't want to do any modelling with Studio Sculpey.
The problem with soft polymer clay is that it's very difficult to mould. You can accidentally squash your creation very easily, and it is also difficult to make small details as the whole lot of sculpey moves together when you try and mould only a small area of it.
Sculpey III, Sculpey Premo!, Super Sculpey, and Fimo Classic all are reasonably hard and work well for modelling though.
The good thing about making the eggs out of sculpey / fimo as opposed to plasticine is that they don't get their features squashed while you're handling them. Unfortunately, adding accessories to sculpey eggs is more difficult though. What I did was to use a small piece of plasticine to stick accessories on the sculpey eggs. This didn't work that well though - the accessory was hard to keep stuck on, and you can see the plasticine 'glue' in many of the shots.
If the eggs were made of plasticine, the accessories could just be pushed into the plasticine directly. The accessories could also be built with wire sticking out the handle, so you just pus the wire into the plasticine egg to attach the accessory.
The bit where Kim Jong-il is riding on a horse would also have been much easier if the Kim Jong-il egg was made of plasticine (the horse was already made of plasticine). This would have allowed just sticking a wire in the bottom of the Kim Jong-il egg, and then pushing this into the horse to attach him. As it was with the egg being made from sculpey, I had to use bits of extra plasticine to try and stick him to the horse, which was very difficult, and he kept falling off.
For the things that were made of plasticine, I used Newplast plasticine, and as I said in an earlier post, this is very nice, firm plasticine.
For making the MiG-21 aeroplane, I made it out of pieces cooked separately, then glued them together using UHU glue.
This didn't work that well, as there is lots of glue visible along the edges of the wings, and they are still quite hinged where they are glued to the plane body. What would have been better was to cook the wings first, then push the wings into the plane body to create indents where the wings should go. Then remove the wings and cook the body. Put glue in the indents and push the wings in. This would stop the wings hinging, and you can wipe off any excess glue as the glue only needs be inside the indent, which you can't see.
For photographing the eggs I used my Canon 450D set to High Quality Medium JPEG. I wanted good enough quality for 1080p, no point shooting Large JPEG or RAW as it would take much longer to arrange and create the animations in Photoshop.
I used the 18-55 Canon kit lens on the camera, and mounted it on a tripod with a Manfrotto geared head. For lighting I used an ebay radio trigger and a Nikon SB800 on a lightstand with white shoot-thru umbrella. A cheap tripod, camera and natural light would work nearly as well as the more expensive equipment I used. The benefit of using flash though is that you don't have to worry about the light changing as you take the photos.
For the moving clouds background during the dogfight scene, I took this using natural light. The light changed while I was taking the photos, it was quite an annoying job to try and equalise the exposure between all the images in Photoshop. I couldn't find any way to do automatic exposure adjustment (I even tried PTGUI), so I had to manually adjust the brightness of each image / layer.
Most of the animation in the video was done in the standard stop-motion way, though for some of it, (e.g. dogfight scene, Egg moving towards singing Kims, Kims eating eggs, Missiles at the end) we used images of the eggs. For these scenes I photographed the eggs / planes with a white background, then cut them out using Topaz Remask 3 or Magic wand tool or the Magnetic Lasso tool in Photoshop. I saved the cut out image as a 32bit PNG (24bit PNG with 8bit alpha transparency).
The PNG image was then animated in Photoshop or using Sony Vegas. Sony Vegas was used to put the video together, and L did most of the work with that as I'm not very good with Vegas.
For the animated sequences in Vegas, we had to make sure to check 'No resample' on the clip's properties in Vegas. Otherwise Vegas seems to try and improve the video by merging each frame into the next frame. This would probably give a more fluid look if you shot enough images to use a high frame rate. But our clips were shot at about 5fps, and the resampling just made the clips look weird and ghosty.
Creating this video has taken quite a long time. Probably most of the time was spent making the eggs as we only did this in the evenings and sometimes at the weekends.
I think that about covers the making of this video and my thoughts on what I'd do different next time.
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