Monday, August 30, 2010

First post of Fall 2010 semester

     Well, I did get some work on my puppets and set done over the summer, but not as much as I would have liked. The most difficult part of my process has been trying to find the money to buy the supplies I need, and looking for methods of making set pieces that will cheap enough not to strain my budget while still looking good. Pictures of my puppet armatures to come soon.

     Another difficult part of the process this week has been re-working my storyboards and animatic. I've cut out some scenes that seemed either too boring and irrelevant to the story, or too difficult to animate in the time frame I'm working under. Right now I'm redrawing all my boards in photoshop, trying to work adding in more dynamic angles and shots. I've seen enough subpar animated student films where the characters just sit flatly in the middle of the screen to know that is NOT what I want.
     I want to take my film in a more cinematic and hopefully more professional-looking direction, cutting on the action and using interesting closeups and angles, even though with my limited stop motion equipment a lot of camera movement (pans, tracking etc.) won't be an option. To help me conceptualize what a successful film looks like, I've done some film studies of shots from Coraline, Spirited Away, Corpse Bride, and several other movie clips.

     One thing I was happy with this week is how the seats I'm building are turning out. I thought a lot about how to make seats that (a) all look more or less identically mass-produced, (b) are cheap and (c) are strong enough to hold up to about 5-6 months of animating. The best method I could come up with was to use fiberglass cloth with resin, molded to a curved piece of metal bent to the shape the seats will be.
     Using this method I now have 4 more or less identical, fairly smooth double seats, though they still need to be sanded, primed, and painted. It's too soon to know how they will look at the end of the day, but I was happy to find a reasonably economical method that met the seat criteria I had set. The background seats that will not be in heavy use will just be thin aluminum metal, bent to the appropriate shape and primed and painted to look like the fiberglass seats.