Photos from my Shady past

I thought it would be a bit of a giggle to have a look at some photos I’ve taken for previous projects and in my spare time, mainly to see if there is anything I can learn from them that can be applied to my current project but also because I though it was about time I put some actual photographs on it.

All of these photos are either shot on my trusty Canon T-70 or Pentax K1000 using a wide-angle lens or a zoom, off the top of my head I’m not sure about the focal lengths. Some have been tweaked a little in Photoshop to improve contrast and remove the odd scratch but that’s the extent of any digital meddling. These where also all shot on film, most developed by the lovely people at Boots but I did develop some myself and where I did I often used a purple filter to improve the contrast.

So, here we have a lovely picture of a burnt out car in a field, this passes for fun with all the cool cats in my neck of the woods. Lets have a look at it then, well I took it because I liked the contrast between the manky car and its surroundings, a bit cliché perhaps but ho-hum. The horizon line is quite nicely placed in the lower third of the picture, making the car look nice and insignificant, like it was part of the surroundings.
I do have an annoying habit of just standing there when I take a picture, mainly because I get a bit snap-happy and I have another annoying habit of finding myself in the middle of nowhere when I go off taking pictures and don’t fancy straddling a load of barbed-wire to get the perfect angle, I am trying to be more brave though. I think the picture could have benefited from being shot from a slightly lower angle to make it that bit more interesting.

Here are some pretty ferns, not a practically challenging picture to take but it was a right pain to keep my feet out of the picture. The original was lacking a bit in contrast which I later tweaked digitally but if I’d been thinking on the day I could have used a filter to jazz it up a bit.













Not a bad picture, the tree on the left is bit annoying and if I’d taken it from a lower angle I could have got rid of that hill which messes up the silhouette. There is a bit of a silhouette theme going on because some of these pictures where taken on a particularly sunny day and I didn’t have a polarizing filter, so I went silhouette hunting instead.











Ooo, crazy over-exposure and I don’t know what was going on with the framing. I do quite like the over-exposure bit though, especially where the tree at the back fades off into the shadow. Something like this in my project would be quite nice.












I’m not sure what it is about this picture that I don’t like but I don’t like it, maybe it’s just a bit boring. If you could actually see the stream disappearing off into the distance it might improve it. And once again a lower angle would be good.The background is under-exposed too.













This picture had the potential to be a nicely framed shot but the tree on the right messes it up a bit as does the ridiculously bright patch of grass in the foreground. I do like the hill fading into the mist in the background though. I’m not too sure about the lens flair, I think it would have to be much more exaggerated to look good, lens hood would have been a better option.






This picture is quite nice and spacious that big shadow right across the foreground is a tad annoying, perhaps if I’d come back later in the day it might have gone away. The sky is also lacking a bit of contrast.








What a nice post, not very exiting though.

















Quite a nice pretty picture, it might have benefited from a slightly lower angle to exaggerate the hill. The main focus was supposed to be ruin, which is completely lost, but I still think its quite a nice picture.







I do like the great big rock thing in the foreground, its just a bit of a shame that the castle isn’t in focus.















This was a bit of happy accident that occurred because I had two prints of the same picture. I really like the crazy ass distortion that’s going on, I’m not so sure about the leaf though. It could have been better to over expose the shot slightly to make everything glow a bit too.













This was an experiment that I did using double exposure, the look I was going for didn’t really happen because I was layering exposed areas of negatives on others. It has made quite a nice moody picture though and if I where to bung it in Photoshop to darken up the hedge on the right you needn’t know it was a double exposure.



I really like this picture, its nice and abstract thing very moody and quite sinister, very Quayesque (sorry to keep banging on about the Quay brothers). This picture was achieved by simply over-exposing everything. This look is the sort of thing I want for my project, I might have to go off and invent something to put in the set to make nice silhouettes like this.





I would like to think that shooting this reflection of some trees jazzes up what would otherwise be a pretty normal shot of some trees. I quite like it but I’m not sure if the fact that it’s a reflection adds anything to the picture.





Little tree meets big trees. Yet another silhouette I’m afraid, the foreground needs darkening up a bit but apart from that I think it looks ok.







Another experiment with double exposure, which I tried to use to create something, that was a bit abstract. The post is a bit annoying but I think that could be easily Photoshoped out.















This a series of photos that I took round the house one day when I was a bit board. I was doing some experiments with some more extreme camera angles and deliberate over-exposure and I really like the results. This is the kind of look that I want to try and get on my final project.
















A quick snap which I think was taken in London. It had the potential to be quite good but the angle is a bit crap, it would have been better if I could have got closer to the wall.

Hate - A force for good?

Well here we are, new term, supposedly ready to leap into production – lets face it this was about as likely to happen as me sprouting an extra head I still hate this project with a passion but I am going to use this as a force for good – in theory at least. And how do I intend to unleash the raw creative potential that only hate can provide? Well, my tried and tested theory is that when I no longer care about the outcome of a project some kind, of creative mind block is removed and ideas flounce out all over the place. Lets take a look at previous examples shall we…

Live at 5: the sports table which everyone liked was produced during a period when I would have rather beat a broadcast journalism student round the head with a blunt instrument than produced for them various flashy graphics, in-fact the sports table was born out of a personal vendetta I was raging against the whole project, a vendetta which failed. Perhaps if I set out to deliberately create the most stupid thing I can I might get something good.

OSTN: a project which started out similar to the pied piper fiasco where nothing seemed to work, so I stopped caring, dispensed with the narrative and threw in a bit of moon walking and ended up with my highest scoring project to date – go figure.

Jesus Just Left Chicago: easily the most creative and least restricted thing I have done in the past year or so. I didn’t necessarily fall out with this one I just didn’t have the time to care in the first place, so none of it was taken seriously and it was cobbled together in an evening.

So what I am proposing is that I do away with the structure imposed by the narrative as that doesn’t seem to help me at all. Instead I will use the animatic I do have to dictate key events which must take place and then improvise the rest of the animation around these events. The real test will be in the editing but if I strip everything down to keep the camera angles and lighting really simple continuity should hopefully not be an issue and everything will hopefully come together at the 11th hour. Failing that I will at least have some nice animated set-pieces for my show-reel.

This week my aim is to get the animatic to a stage where I know exactly what camera angles I need, the actual finished animatic will not resemble the finished product in the slightest as I am using it as a more trial and error sort of thing to work out what looks pretty. I also want a rough idea on timing – obviously a lot of this will be dictated by the final editing but its good to have something to aim towards. For better or worse I want all of this out of the way by the end of the week as next week is dedicated to set-build, then couple of days to ponce about with lights before diving into production I have a schedule- and I mean to stick to it.

Happy New Year - welcome to the year of the limbless sloth

Happy new years and all that jazz. It’s been a while but I’m back. Apologies for the complete lack of anything recently, the dissertation has more or less taken over my life as of late but the first draft of that is now done and my new year’s resolution is not to do anything else to it for at least a week. And during that week I shall endeavour to get you up to date with all things animationy in my life.

First off I would like to announce that I have decided to merge this blog with the new baby blog, ‘photo phodder’ since I spend most of my time on it referring to stuff that is on this one or repeating stuff I have already written here. Plus it will make this blog look really big and impressive. So over the next couple of days bits of it will appear on here, I will try to edit it down so I’m not talking about things twice but inevitably something will slip through so bare with me.

Right, on to the project, well things are charging forward at the rate of a sloth, which has had all of it’s limbs removed with a spoon, looking for a straw it doesn’t really want in a hypodermic needle stack – I am brimming over with confidence. Quite frankly I think I might be able to make the rate of progress on the robots project look positively lightning fast but no one ever got anywhere with sloth based metaphors so I will pretend all is well and dandy and attempt to come up with something constructive.

I’m pretty much there in terms of knowing how I’m going to animate everything and how I’m going to build the set (specific entries on this soon) but surprise, surprise I still don’t have a proper storey. I was hoping that refusing to look at it over Christmas would mean I would come back with some amazing idea, alas this is not so, if anything I hate the whole concept even more than when I started – hate is not too strong a word I might add. I think at this stage I need to be told to do the storey i’ve got and hope it is better than I think it is or a radical shiny new approach is required. And as I write this the radical new shiny approach is looking favourable.

Rather than focusing on what I don’t have lets look at what I do got. I have characters, a way to animate them and a set, all be it an un-built set but nevertheless a set. I have a look as it where. From animation I’ve done in the past I’ve discovered that my best ideas decide to surface whilst I’m animating, so I’m very tempted to go back to uni, build the set and just start animating, using my half-hearted excuse for an animatic as a starting point only. It’s 50/50 as to whether or not this would work of course, the animation can always be reshot once I know what I want to do. So I guess the only way to fond out is to do it.

Yes, it can be argued that I should have done this sort of thing last term but its to late for should ofs and could ofs and the conventional method of doing things is clearly not working for me. As for the poor little second years that are supposed to work for me and will require meticulously planned storyboards and the like to tell them what to do… well that’s simple, I wont provide them with any. I have decided that I’m not going to have anyone helping with the animation so all I need is someone for sound and maybe some comping and if I don’t have a story by the time I get round to doing that then keeping a second year in the loop will be the least of my worries.

Design Bible

Here is my design bible: an explanation coming soon!

New story line

Once again I’m afraid that the update on the dissertation progress and the character development that I did over the summer will have to be put on hold as surprise, surprise, I have changed the storyline for the final project again. All shall be explained shortly but first I would like to announce the arrival of my brand spanking new blog (one clearly wasn’t enough) “Photography Fodder” – it sounds better if you say it in a Cornish accent, dedicated to all things of a camera and light based nature. As of yet there is nothing on it but over the coming weeks I plan to post some stuff on it for your viewing pleasure.

So, the story line I am running with for this week is that the piper now survives and bludgeons the poor little creatures to death with a book; all would have been explained in my lovely animatic, but blogger wont let me load it. So I will have to describe it to you: (if anyone really wants to see it let me know) it contains elements from the original storyboard as well as new stuff which aims to build up the characters a bit.
I have tried to keep the different types of shots to a minimum, I think I will be able to get away with three or four, to speed up filming as much as possible, camera movement has also been limited; now there are only two shots requiring it, the truck-in on the poster shouldn’t be too much of a problem but the pan shot of the creatures may be a bit tricky, so I will have to do some tests to see if it will work.
I am hoping that this is pretty much the finished article in terms of the story, as this is the third version, obviously it still needs a bit of tarting-up to make it look pretty though. The main problem encountered with the story has been establishing the character’s roles and giving the audience something to empathies with. I have tried to solve this by showing the poster at the beginning, which will be advertising for someone to get rid of the creatures or something along those lines – the piper now has a purpose. The piper now has a proper sinister walk and nasty hand-rub thing going on, basically stolen off the child-catcher in Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang – we now know the piper is bad and wrong (this also sets up a nice twist when things go wrong for her). The piper is constantly referring to a manual – we know she isn’t very good at her job.
As you have hopefully noticed from the animatic everyone now has eyes, so they can see, it also makes the creatures a bit more cute and lovable. Which character the audience empathies with is still a problem, mainly because I am still not that sure which character I want them to like. I have also started to look at things like The Trapdoor for inspiration to inject the animation and character design with a bit more humor. This week I hope to go away and do a bit more concept art of the characters to give them that trap-dooresque kinda look because the current look of the characters isn’t really working.

new script

I know that I was, at some point, going to go through the development of the final project and a bit of a dissertation update but for the time being I think I need to go through the rather drastic changes that have taken place to the script of the final project.

So we had the original storey, which was basically the Pied Piper storey, both Derrick and Andy suggested that I put a twist in it to make it a bit less predictable. I tried to do this by just making the piper character a bumbling fool and keeping the same storey, except that everything that could go wrong would. Although a bit more entertaining this version of the storey was still way to predictable and in my opinion still too close to the original Pied Piper Storey. So I took it away again and twisted the hell out.

What I created is pretty much the storey I am now running with. The piper is still a bumbling fool but now the creatures get a hold of her flute, control her and then she dies of a heart attack – good wholesome family fun. It is a bit like my OSTN idea (dancing etc.) but at least it is my idea. There are still a couple of issues: I need to establish that the piper character is attempting to be the pied piper – probably by giving her some kind of book which she keeps referring too. I also need to develop the chain of events that lead to the piper throwing away the flute which leads to the creatures getting hold of it as it all happened a bit suddenly.

So my next job is to re-do the storyboard, most of which can hopefully be salvaged from the old one but we shall see. I am going to try and but a bit more emphasis on continuing action from shot to shot though – just to make it flow better.

A little bit more

Back again! Time to try and a bit of explanation to my earlier post, which was written in the midst of riding the cusp of the creative wave, as it where. I’m a bit more calmed down now, sort of.
Basically I’ve had a bit of a rethink of the script and come to the conclusion that it was a bit up itself so I’ve gone completely the other with it now and tried to poke a bit of fun and generally make it as silly and unserious as possible.
Originally both Andy and Derek had suggested that I look at different ways of playing out the story (eg: having Leurre seem harmless and then turning on the creatures) because it was too predictable but I got the feeling that neither where too hot on the main story. Derek suggested that I look at The Pied Piper of Hamlin by Jiri Barta, I think its safe to say that I am now a firm fan, I especially like The Club of the Laid Off, it very much appeals to my sense of humour and the clumpy looking animation is also quite amusing.





However, this did little to boost my confidence, until I woke up this morning with a rare can-do attitude to life and had a good old brain ‘shower’ session and now have something I shall try to mould into a script.