Stop Motion and How it is Slowely Driving me Mad

A bit hectic and frustrating this week; the stop-motion stuff doesn’t seem to be going anywhere fast - it was supposed to be done by today and we only started doing the tests yesterday. Ideally, I should have done the tests last week, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

So onwards we go! As of yesterday, I am assistant/temporary stand-in animation producer or whatever you want to call it, which basically boils down to me running around like a headless chicken and complaining to anyone who will listen. We have got most of the animation tests done and approved – the best way to move the chickenducks we found has been to glue them too the set and stuff all the joints with plaster-scene to stop them moving. Its been decided that we are going to animate it on ones, as is the floor, as it looks a lot smoother. Ralph has also produced a nice chart, which breaks the head nods down into increments so that we can ease in and out of the movement, we have also decided to hold for a couple of frames at the end of the nod to break it all up a bit.

This morning Charlotte and I did some tests on the big eggcup, which I propped up with plaster-scene. Again it looks better on ones and where I was constantly pulling it about we have ended up with a cool little turning action – a happy accident. Since doing all of that, however, Ben, Ralph and myself have put a bolt through it – balancing the cup on a nut, hopefully allowing us smother and more controlled action, I certainly hope so as it is now rather permanently glued to the set. After me failing to produce a winch for the egg – I tried but it ended in disaster – we have glued a bit of dowel to it and plan to lower it in increments by clamping it to the set. I’m hoping to try and put the tests on here soon put I just ran out of time to do that today.

And to my role of Director of Photography…I have hopefully done all of the lighting tests – I have left them with Ben, so I hope there is something he likes otherwise its back to the drawing board, its all set up pretty much as it described last week but when things quieten down a bit I will write a special lighting blogg…ooooo, to walk you through it. I would put all of the pictures up but trust me, they are not very interesting, unless you are really scarily into lighting. The camera angle has also been approved but that didn’t take much work, as it stays stationary the whole time.

More lighting talk

So what can I tell you about this week, well I have had a play with the lights on the stop-motion set, aided by Ralph and we sort of have a rough idea of how things might work. As predicted everything I planned went out of the window, as we are restricted as to where we can put lights due to the design of the set and the fact that the animators are going to need space to get in and actually animate things.

That said we have a sort of three-point lighting set-up; with lamps and a reflector acting as the fill and back light, the computer software is really useful for controlling the brightness of each light so we can manipulate how they are used. We also have a couple of other lights picking out key details in the scene but I am a bit worried that they will create nasty cross-shadows, so it may require some tweaking. We are also using the aperture and shutter speed settings on Georg’s camera to control how bright everything is and Rosie has said that colour can be added to the light in post so that is something I don’t have to worry about but if I get the time I would like to try and find something to use as a gel just to ease the strain on the post department as they already have quite a lot of work to do on the stop motion stuff once it is filmed. I am hoping that I can do some more tests on Monday as well as working out where to put the camera.

Our pitch project now has a voiceover, provided by Ben and I have done most of the storyboarding and sketches for the animatic, which Rosie is going to start putting together over the weekend. I am hopefully going to finish of the storyboards as well as trying out some more ideas for the backgrounds and drafting out some stuff for the bible.

Lots of Fancy Words to do With Lighting

Some more developments on the pitch project this week; we are now moving away from the idea of using a collage as the background as it was too distracting from the main animation, which is quite simple. For the moment we are experimenting with random abstract shapes for the background, such as ink splats. I have produced a couple of designs, taking inspiration from Ralph Steadman’s work; especially pieces such as Old Blue Eye where he incorporates his drawings into the abstract shape of the splats. I also admire the way he uses colour; using bright, bold colours to emphasize certain areas of his work. I think I may have got a bit carried away though becoming more concerned with producing a finished piece of work rather than simple, abstract shapes and this may create the same problems that the collage did.

At the moment I am not doing an awful lot on the Exeter project as a lot of the stuff I need to do can not be done till next week. However, I am helping Sean to come up with ideas for how the Phoenix eye lighting up could work and I have had a quick think for a possible lighting set-up for the stop-motion. I have brushed up on my film theory and now know lots of big words: My plan is to use a single key light to act as the main light source, the sun, with gels or some improvised kind of filters to create the colours and patterns of the stained glass windows, although that may be able to be dealt with in post. Also, depending on the size of the set, I may need to block some of the light to stop unwanted shadows being cast. I’m also going to go up to the media store tomorrow to see if I can get my hands on some reflectors to provide the back and fill lighting, as it needs to look like there are no other light sources, to create the sense of a musty interior. It may all look too dark, in which case I will have use more lights to provide the back and fill but I would probably try to diffuse them somehow. Although I say all of this now it is most likely that it will all go out of the window on the actual day and I will just move things around till it looks good. My main worry at the moment is that the sun is behind the clock tower, which would silhouette everything that is going on the set and also have the light shining directly into the camera and would need quite a lot of fill lighting to correct (I think).

Pitch Project Things and Stuff

Lots of happenings this week in terms of the pitch project; I am starting to come up various bits of artwork for the bible as well as working on some possible ideas for the presentation. Here are some more development drawings which wont make much sense without the script but they are more or less like the sketches I posted last week.

We are now moving away from the idea of using a history or note book as our background, instead we are going for a sort of scrapbook theme inspired by Jon Burgerman, in particular his Lickins Print, and the print on his Colour-Me Doodle wrapping paper, which use cardboard, post-it notes and other random stuff as a background and has characters drawn onto it. I have done one collage, which looks a bit rubbishy, but I tinkered with it in Photoshop and added some extra textures to spruce it up a bit and quickly stuck a bit of artwork on it to get a rough idea of how it may look. I’m planning to spend tomorrow trying out different layouts and styles and maybe doing a few more backgrounds. I have also experimented with some different textures on the characters but that looked a bit drab and unexciting
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For the presentation we are toying with the idea of animating our narrator, Professor Piddle, which may look good but animating ten minutes worth of lip-sync fills me with dread so I think he may have to be significantly simplified and possibly acquire a beard or something to conveniently covers his mouth. Ben was also thinking of turning him to some kind of rapper man thing that presents the material as a sort of rhyme. I am not quite sure how well this will work put I will have a play with the characters and see what happens.