Love at First Sight - Frame-by-Frame Stop Motion: The Guide to Non-Traditional Animation Techniques - page 192

Now it is time to head to the downshooting stand. If you do not have a
stand, then all you need is a piece of glass and a sheet of green screen
material. You must find a way to mount the glass at a distance from the
green screen board and light both evenly. You should have a series of five
hearts that grow from nothing. These can be cut out from red paper. The
fourth heart is your main heart. The fifth heart is bigger than your main,
number 4 heart, and you get a slight stretch-and-squash effect by using this
sequence. So your shooting sequence is heart 1, 2, 3, 5, 4.
ExErcisE Fig 7.F Hearts and steam in the final product.
Shoot the hearts once on the stand from nothing to heart 1, 2, 3, 5, 4. Hold
heart number 4 and slightly move it to give it a subtle vibration for 20 frames.
The next step is to take some cotton (cotton balls from the drug store will
work) and fabricate a series of five growing cone-shaped cotton steam shoots.
ExErcisE Fig 7.g A series of hearts to be used in the young man's eyes and over the final shot of
the couple gliding away.
This series gets shot once, starting with cotton 1, 2, 3, 4, and finally cotton 5.
Hold on cotton 5 for 20 frames, slightly moving it frame by frame so it vibrates.
Try to keep the cotton from having too many see-through areas so it does
not become too difficult to pull off the green screen in postproduction. You
should consider using a despill filter in After Effects when you pull the cotton
off the green screen background. You can also change the cotton color option
to black and white to get rid of any green spill on the cotton edges.
Now you are ready to go into composite and edit. The first step is to
remove the hearts and the cotton steam shoots from the green screen
backgrounds. For the sake of brevity, I refer you to Chapter 10 in the