Original Ideas

Before we came up with the idea for doing Plastacine stop animation we had gone through a range of other ideas of what we could produce. One of the other options we were interested in originally was the idea of doing a film trailer. One of the first questions we had was whether or not we could do a trailer for our AS level thriller idea of endurance. (If you are interested in finding out more about endurance please visit www.thrill-seekers.blogspot.com). As we found out that this ideas wasn’t necessarily aloud we thought of producing the trailer for endurance and finding another idea for our as thriller resubmit.

Our second choice was to create a short film, the main ideas were to do with animation as we thought that would be the most interesting and creative way to compress into a 5 minute long film. We then thought of the different ways we could do animation. With our main ideas being centred around the comedy aspect we had thoughts of ways to make people laugh focusing on slapstick humour. This would have been focused on some less detailed characters and wouldn’t have given the depth we are looking for at A level. Another consideration was to draw out character’s and pin the limbs together to make a character that is easy to move with a childish look and feel to it. Once again we would have incorporated a lot of colour to create a pleasant and cheerful tone for the short film. Again the childish short film idea just didn’t have the feel or quality we were looking for.

We were then inspired by a previous animation we had produced called “Milly, Marvin and Malcolm”. This featured 3 different coloured blobs of Plastacine running around hectically trying to hurt each other in different ways.

To do this we used stop motion to move each character around on a whiteboard and we drew in the different ways that they could hurt each other with a marker pen. Although this was really fun to both create and watch, the same problem came up. It just lacked that professional look. So we took the Plastacine idea from Milly, Marvin and Malcolm and decided to incorporate it into another idea.

When I was searching you tube for ideas and other peoples work on animation, I saw one of Tim Burton’s early works called ‘Vincent’, featured earlier on the blog it features a gothic style combining both comedy and horror to create a brilliant look. This was the look we had been looking for and decided finally to create an animation in the style of Tim Burton. And that is when we started to think about Lucy Fir and Rest in Pieces.