Flippovision - Army Men

Plastic army men engage in combat.
(7/26/11) Thanks for the comments. I'm not very active, but I'll try to answer a few questions I've seen:
- I got the plane at a Wal-Mart around 1996. I haven't seen another in a long time. I'm not even sure where mine is.
- Some friends from high school and I made this back in 2001. We used 12 frames per second so that video is a compilation of approximately 7,000 still photos.
- Shooting took place over a couple weeks, so it's hard to estimate the exact time. Generally one person manned the camera, one or two moved the pieces, and one shuttled floppy disks with the pictures to the computer. (We only had an old Sony Mavica.)
- We compiled the video with Adobe Premiere. We originally planned to add fire effects and muzzle flashes, but ran out of time. We added sound effects, text, etc. with that program.
- Likewise, we built the blue box with the intention of blue-screening the background, but it didn't work as well as we hoped. (See the takeoff sequence.) We decided it would look cleaner to just leave the blue background. We did use the blue-screen for the helicopter, though.
- We wrote a high level script that generally described each scene and what would take place, including approximate times for each shot. (E.g. "Squad wades to shore - ten seconds.") Before shooting each mini-sequence, we would finalize the plan.
- We shot scenes in the order of increasing likelihood that they would damage our box. We used plastic lining to hold in the water for the beach scene, but shot it last because we were afraid it would ruin our set. (It actually held pretty well.)
Overall, it was a lot of fun. I'd highly encourage anyone else to give something like this a shot.