Chris Sutton: Stop motion animation brainstorming
Mediums
- Shadow puppet
- Paper cut out
- Clay- mation
- Sand - mation
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.
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