I have been working on the tree for the hill scene, the puppets and putting the final touches on the stage.

Turns out that giving the puppets teeth can make them a bit fun looking. It works for the smiles but it doesn't work for anything else. I spent most of Friday relaxing and working on expressions for the puppets. To save time and material, I have made around 3 - 4 mouths to show expression. The character's eyebrows and the assistant's hair will remain as wet clay so we can move them.

I have started putting latex on the second set of arms I made and will do the second half on tuesday. I had to make two new sets of arms, as the two sets I used in my test with the liquid latex turn out poorly and a much darker tone than I wanted. This is probably due to the fact I went over board with the brown paint. This isn't a total loss though as the arms I picked for the test were the ones that I considered of the low quality. Remaking the arms meant that I could improve the size and shape of the arms in regards to the character proportions.

On Wednesday 5 of October, Liam cooked the heads I crafted for our characters. It went mostly according to plan, with the exception of two brunt noses, the magician and one of the police men. Hope I can fix this problem with some paint.

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I have started painting the faces and hands to have a matching skin. this requires multiple layers of paint to cover the clay as it doesn't absorb the paint very well.

Currently I feel a bit split, due to the multiple assignments I have due. While I feel I am most on track to finish the stop motion over the comic (I'm going to need to bust a gut to get the 2D done. You might see me in hospital soon) I am a bit fed up with the stop motion. This is mainly due to the fact I find that I end doing most of the work. I had a hand in every part of the build, if I didn't build the whole bit. About the only thing that is solely Liam's work is the seating in the stage scene and to be quite frank he hasn't done a very good job.

Yes, I'm being a bit mean to Liam in this post, but I'm just looking back at the assignment and seeing a lot of my blood, sweat and tears and not a lot of completed work from Liam.

The heads look fine I guess, but I had to cut some clay away from the mouths as the faces seems to have shrank when they were cooked.

6 September - 13 September

I have spent 7 hours at the tin shed and I have 10 puppet arms (minus the latex) and burning eyes. My problem currently is that I don't think all the arms I made are all usable. This is mainly due to the fact some of the arms are too long and some hands are too large, some half again the size I was aiming for. I can salvage some of this by cutting down the arms to make them shorter and using the larger of the usable arms for the more bulky police men.

The stage scene is starting to take form and Liam and I have started putting together the cardboard buildings for the street scene. We really don't want to be spending too much time on the rest of the sets.

Arms and stage as of Tuesday 6 September

On Friday and Sunday, I spent 4 - 5 hours working on various parts of the stop motion. While Liam was there on Friday, I worked on the bases of the puppet head (tin foil lollypops) while Liam prepared the last parts of the audience seating. On Sunday I put together the beginnings of the hill scene, put coats of paint over polystere boards that will serve as out backgrounds and grabbed a bunch of new material that I will use to finish off the stage. 

The stage has caused a another problem, the 45 degree angle cut off corners cause large holes at the back of the stage.

Hill scene base

Hill scene base

Puppet head bases

Red cloth for the stage

Puppet head bases/ Tin lollypops

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I have started working on the heads for our puppets and I am finding the working rather "interesting". The fact that the heads are so small means that working on the smaller details with my hands is out of the question. Tools are the only reasonable means I have to do this work. The head in the picture above is the first one I have made, constructed for Dr Lache, the magician and protagonist. Because I'm stupid I worked with the clay after using black paint. The little bits of paint fused with the clay and has given it a slightly darker tone. This should be a deal breaker however as the Doctor's looks don't really affect the story. I might make another if I have the time, but I want to get other things done first. 

The hill scene is coming along nicely, but I get the feeling that was the easy parts, I still need to create a grass layer for the outer coating and twist a tree out of wire and other materials. Liam brought in a sack cloth the would work as the grass layer and we have found some green and brown spray paint to give the sack a earthen  look. 

Stop motion research

- Stop motion animation goes high tech at Laika = https://youtu.be/plXmbLAUTRg
- Credited as :Stop motion Animator = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij3IbplMisA
- Behind the scenes of Kubo and the two strings: Montage = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHyTYL1Z1aM
- Inside Pixar studio with Monsters University = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gAlsk9t950
- Boxtroll's Puppets - Behind the Scenes Video from MSMFF = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbiXdYNwpog

Making the sets

We have started work on the stage, street and hill sets for our stop motion short film. While I am enjoying the work, I am really anxious to get the sets do asap. We have been working for two weeks now and we have only gotten part of the way through making the stage set. With two/ three more to sets to go and characters to make, I am starting to feel the pinch already.

This time constraint is made a bit worse by the fact Liam lives out of town. Although he has said he will be there during the break week. I would like to be finished with the set and character by the end of that week with time during that week to work on 2D and comic. As such I am probably going to try to spend extra time in the Tin shed to get some more progress done. Whether this be after class or during the weekend is yet to be seen.

For the street scene we are planning to use cardboard to create the buildings as it as a lightweight material that we have a lot of. Making the buildings out of wood would be impractical. Liam is going to create the buildings at home and bring them.

For the last two weeks, Liam and I have been working only on the stage scene. This is because the material for the characters still has not arrived and the stage is one of two complex scenes to construct, the other being the street scene. Liam has been working on the audience and seating while I have been building the stage its self. The once aspect of the stage we still haven't figured out is how we are going to get the curtains to move when the show has ended. Liam wants to the something similar to a real stage or a shower curtain but I feel like that might be a bit too much work for something that should be simple and insignificant. I lucked out with making the stage as I was able to find several pieces that suited my purposes and required little to no cutting.

The hill is going to be made of polystyrene shavings/ cutoffs, papermasha and foam. Liam is talking about making the hill hollow, but I'm not sure that it be stable if it were hollow.

I have done a number of t pose drawings, one for each character. These drawings are simply to allow Liam and I to work on the sets while the puppet material is still in the mail and to give us a rough idea of what the final characters will look like. The drawings are around the size I would like the characters to be, 20 cm tall, give or take.

Claire: The Magician's Assistant

The Police men

Dr Lache

Character construction research

http://www.stopmotionworks.com/articles/artofSMchpt7.pdf

- Credited as: Head of puppetery  = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kll7aLqgDpE

- Academy Originals - YouTube channel = https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzuwS1ll2HuQ1wV-tqf43KQ

Animatic

We have been trying to split the work for the animatic as evenly as possible. However to avoid complexations, Liam is doing most of the editing and animting for the assignment. By having just one person putting together the final product for this assignment, we hope to avoid problems that might be caused be trying to editing the animatic sperately. While I admit Liam has done a lot more work than I have, I haven't been slacking. We decided around week 3 - 4 that Liam would work on the thumbnails, first half of the story and the timing of the shots and I would work on character design and the last two scenes of the animatic. We have also both taken time to search through the sound files provided by SIT for this project, and find the ones we would like to use.

I feel like the work relationship I have with Liam is currently a bit unequal. For a lot of the impactful decisions on the animatic, he has asked for my approval. I'm not sure if he sees me in the director's role for this short film or if this whole sencionro is all in my head, but I feel like I end up with the final say on what goes and what is cut. While I am perfectly happy as a director, but I also don't want to take away Liam's creative influence on the project or have him do all the work. It might just be that I am not used to working with others on creative projects, but as I mentioned before I feel like I haven't done as much as Liam has on the animatic. I believe this stems from a problem we have. It is that Liam lives outside of town and doesn't have an easy means of getting to and from SIT whenever he wants. This means that Liam and I have to work apart outside of class hours, so we can't be sure of what point the other is up to. It could also be that I am just use to carrying the whole work load by myself, so I could be mistaken and this might not actual be a problem. After all, I did a lot of the conceptual work for the story, before we even begun the animatic.

Characters
After a long discussion with Liam, we have decided that the best style for our stop-motion would be best created using crafted puppets. While I am a bit disappointed, it was important that we got the style sorted out as quickly as possible so we could work on the animatic and material list. Anymore delaying would set us behind.

I have been working on the character concepts when I can find time. So far I only have sorted out the look for the police officers. While I don't have a finished sketch for the Magician or his assistant, I have an idea of what they should look like. The Magician should be a slender man in a suit and bow tie. His face is a sharp triangle with a point for the chin and a long pointy nose. Some examples of this would be Count Olaf from Lemon Snicket or the magician from Pixar's "".

The assistant is a beautiful 'well built' woman wearing a long red dress. She has big blue eyes and wears make up. Her face is much rounder, like an oval or sphere. Some influence's on her look include 'Meg' from Paperman and 'Sally' from "A Nightmare before Christmas".

The police are muscular tall men in stereotypical british police uniforms. While aren't overly buff, the police men are much taller and stockier than the magician. Their faces are very hard and are rectangular in shape. For the design of the police men, I used examples from a new video game called "We Happy Few" as a reference.

Stopmotion idea brainstorming

Chris Sutton: Stop motion animation brainstorming

Mediums

• Shadow puppet
• Paper cut out
• Clay- mation
• Sand - mation

While I like the idea of Shadow puppetry and Sand-mation, I think the paper cut out style might be a better choice for this assignment.

Story ideas

• Liam - Magician act gone wrong.

• Chris - The boy who taunted the wolf. A boy traveling through the woods finds a trapped wolf. The boy taunts the beast. The boy ends up becoming trapped with the wolf who devours him.

• Chris - Traveler meets death, The traveler is a low and depressed character. Death is a fun and light hearted character.

• Liam - Explorer who reaches the end of the world. Tries to explore further. Tries to glide to a new land. Dies in the attempt.

BRAIN WAVE!!!! NEW STORY IDEA!!!!

I had a great idea for the story of this assignment. Liam came up with the idea of a magician's act where at the end the magician accidentally decapitates his beautiful assistant and the crowd thinks that it is all part of the act. I decided to take that idea and run with it.

The story starts with the magician at his final act where his assistant is meant to survive a guillotine that would cut her head off. Watching the show in the front seats is the assistant's fiancee. The magic trick fails and decapitates the assistant. The magician realizes immediately but the crowd applause him, thinking that it is just another magic trick. The magician quickly closes the stage curtains and takes the body back to his dressing room.

The assistant's fiancee is waiting outside her dressing. He checks his watch, clearly getting worried or suspicious. The fiancee then hears crash and heavy breathing from the magician's dressing room. Thinking that his bride-to-be is having an affair with her boss, the fiancee pokes his head into the magician's dressing room. What he sees his the magician panicking as he paces around the dressing room with the disembodied head of the assistant. Realizing that the magician has killed his bride-to-be, the fiancee runs to inform the police.

The fiancee comes back to the theatre's back entrance with the police just in time to catch the magician sneaking out the back door with a large sack. The magician spots the cops and runs away. Madly blowing their whistles, the policemen and fiancee give chase, starting a Scooby Doo like chase around the streets. After a long bizarre chase, the police corner the magician, but instead of arresting him or checking inside the bag, the cops ask for the magician's autograph. Furious, the fiancee can only watch as the magician walks away Scot free while still holding the sack containing the assistant's corpse.

Still under moonlight the magician approaches a tree at the top of a hill, holding a spade and the sack. As the magician digs the shallow grave, the corpse of his assistant slowly begins to reanimate. The magician turns around just in time to see the zombie assistant reattach her head. The magician screams like a little girl. The zombie assistant attacks the magician, screaming like a banshee. The camera fades to black as the POV is consumed by an abyss in  the zombie assistant's wide open mouth.

Style

I personal think that this would be a great story to do in cut out style of animation. I was thinking that something similar to the style of Lotte Reiniger. However I know Liam is interested in clay-mation, so something like the style of Wallace and Gromit might be a possibility.

Alice: Madness Returns

I think the cut out animation style would be prefect for this story. An example of what I am thinking out is the style used in one of my favorite video games of all time, "Alice: Madness Returns". Some of the in game cuts scenes use a 3D rendered image made to look like cut out animation with characters and objects drawn in pen. I would really like to try something similar, but with actual stop motion animation.

The game also uses exaggerated proportions to disfigure some of the characters. I think it might be worth giving some of the characters exaggerated feature so it is easier to tell them apart. An example of this would be giving the magician a huge pointy nose. The color palette from Alice Madness Return's cut out cut scene is also some thing to look at. They use a yellow-white color for the paper and black for the pen lines. More interestingly, color is used on the background and as ambient light to convey tone or mood. The example above use a desaturated blue fore despair or melancholy and red for fear and horror.

Opening cinemtic 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5OYaLDTCW0

All 2D cinematics 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g8njk3xO64

Backwater Gospel

 The backwater Gospel uses very sketchy line work in it's 3D characters and I think something similar would be good for the stop animation as it would help the rather gruesome undertones of the story. 

It would also mean that the drawings of the character could be a bit rougher a save us the time of having to polish every single line on the cutouts. Backwater Gospel is also a good place to look for a guide on character exaggeration.