The dinner hall of the orphanage

Since finishing the town my time has been spent making the other settings needed and one of this is the dining hall inside the orphanage. Since this setting is likely to only feature in the first minute of our piece we have decided to just use cardboard to compose it. I then just painted the same base colour for the walls and floors to show how dull and plain the orphanage is. I'm now in the process of adding shading to the walls and detail to the floor. The window area was already set back a few millimetres so i simply painted the setback plain black and added a grey streak down the middle. I then cut a small rectangle of cardboard to fill the bottom of the window area to show that it's the large window on the outside and painted the sides to look slightly darker due to light effects. This covers the small holes that the cardboard shows giving a more complete effect.

The dining hall so far

Character POV shot of corner

The Hills

Now that the basic town setting is complete I've started construction on the second of our sets, the park. The park will feature two hills one of which should be far more prominent than the other. This kind of deformed balance is a frequent theme in Tim Burton's settings, For example the spiral hill in The Nightmare Before Christmas. To show the isolation of the setting there will be one tree and a bench on the larger of the two hills.

Here is my final design for it:

On Friday I drew out the base of the hill on a piece of MDF. I then created the hill shape by stapling chicken wire to the wood and shaping the hill accordingly.After stuffing the shape with newspaper I covered the wire frame in Modrock to solidify the shape and provide a base which can be painted and support the models that will be placed on it. 

Pictures of my progress are shown below:

Wire frame stuffed with newspaper

The hill after being coated in Modrock

Textual Analysis on The Nightmare Before Christmas

Looking at the opening scene of 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' By Tim Burton in terms of sound right at the beginning there is music which sounds rather classical and soft using a lot of orchestral sounds, we have taken inspiration from this for our animation and using soft eerie piano sounds to set the scene and this also creates the sense of fantasy which Tim Burton exaggerates in his piece also. The Audience is then introduced to the narrator whom tells the story using Rhyme "as this story you're about to be told took place in the holiday place of old" we have also decided to use this idea for our Animation as it makes the audience question the realism again giving that sense of Mystery. Tim Burton then uses deep orchestral music to create tension and to bring the Animation into song in our piece we have decided not to make it a musical as we would like to put our own ideas into it and creating songs would be challenging with the short time that we have not to mention the fact that our piece is 5 minutes long and the average song consists of an average of 3 minutes per musical score.


In terms of lighting Tim Burton uses a lot of shadows to create his creepy alternative look which we will also be adapting into our piece using the light we have which can change colour and brightness to fit the mood we want to create but the lighting overall in Tim Burton's piece is very low-key but we have decided to contrast the lighting in ours by having the park scene in high key lighting to show the outside world as bright whereas in the Orphanage the lighting will be dull low key night and day. Tim Burton also emphasises the moon light in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" this creates a Gothic creepy look carrying on the theme we also want to use the idea of moonlight being a main source of light especially for the graveyard scene as it will create the perfect creepy mood we are looking for.


In terms of camerawork Tim Burton uses a long take all the way through taking us through the different parts of the Halloween town slowly revealing different parts while panning fast at the same time, we have adapted this idea for our piece at the opening to take us through our sets of the old Victorian town swooping into the Orphanage. Tim Burton also has his characters acknowledging the camera and introducing themselves to it in song, we will not be doing this in our piece as it would not fit with our storyline.


In terms of Mise-en-Scene Tim Burton uses mostly plasticine for his characters and to line his sets with, we will be doing this also as it is the style of Animation we have chosen to do this allows us to manipulate it to how we want. The audience are taken through a grave yard which is highly exaggerated using long tall skinny grave stones and big exaggerated skulls, we are going to adapt this for our piece as it creates that Gothic creepy look which we are trying to achieve. The Characters are very exaggerated and un realistic they're either really fat and round or really long and stick thin. We have decided to use this look for our characters but they're more realistic then Tim Burton's Characters as his are monsters and we are using actual people. Tim Burton often uses black skinny cats in his animations and "The nightmare before Christmas" is no exception we have decided to use the idea of using an animal in our piece and to use a black cat as they have creepy Myths behind them but are also realistic to have a pet who is Lucy Firrs companion in our animation.

The Town Buildings are complete

We have now finished construction of the main component of our town setting, the building fronts. The details for the windows and doors have been done using acrylic paints and as you can see from the images below the same colour palette has continued throughout. I personally feel that we have successfully completed this to the standard that we were hoping to give that Gothic, creepy feel to our piece. Here are some more pictures:

The right side

The left side

The Orphanage

The finished front

Use of lighting - Colour

Lighting is an important aspect in setting the mood and tone in film. To help us create our gloomy yet chilled atmosphere we are using the light shown below. It has a dial remote that changes the colour of the light to any shade you can make. Therefore using mainly blue, white, yellow and possibly red colours in our lighting. The use of this light will definitely enable us to easily play round with lighting. As soon as the town setting has finished construction we will start doing some test shots on how the lighting effects the sets and characters.

Colour changing light

Our own little Cat :)

After deciding to include a cat in our animation, I started drawing out our own little ideas on how the cat should look. We were hoping to achieve a sly, underfed looking cat. Here are the results:

Head shot

The whole cat 

The Cat and the Moon

After viewing many of Tim Burton's work, I have noticed a certain fascination with cats and the moon. These two things are often featured in his work, for example the nightmare before Christmas is  famous for the spiral hill with the giant moon behind it. It would be difficult to research the film without coming across pictures sampling an exaggerated overuse of the moon. Similarly the corpse bride displays a similar obsession with moonlight, with the corpse bride herself (Emily) saying "I've spent so long in the darkness, I'd almost forgotten how beautiful the moonlight is". It is as if Tim Burton is trying to show just how overlooked the moon can be when it can emphasise the slightest features simply by casting its ghostly shadow over that object.

Similarly yet less provocatively, a cat is featured in many of Tim Burton's work. In corpse bride a cat can be seen strolling and creeping around the town during the introduction, in the nightmare before Christmas there is an alarm which is shaped as a screaming cat and the more obvious example is in Vincent where a cat is featured as one of Vincent's companions. 
So to show our own little obsession of Tim Burton's work, we have decided to use his effects of the moon and include a new character known simply as the orphanage cat who will be shown as Lucy's only friend.

Settings - Construction part 4

Once again we have been working on the town setting adding depth and character to each building. Each tall, narrow building is starting to take it's own dull yet spooky shape. Here are some more photos of our progress. With our settings close to completion we can start to look at lighting and it's effect on our settings.

The towns progress so far with character comparison

Town so far without characters

Left side progress

Left side with orphanage

Close up of orphanage progress

Close up of orphanage featuring character models

The right side, starting to gain detail

Milly, Marvin and Malcolm

As mentioned in earlier posts, here is our previous work on animation. There is a jump cut from one of the blobs having a thought bubble to Malcolm in a forest. The problem there was that istop motion could only handle smaller files and therefore after reaching a certain size, about 30 seconds worth of footage was lost and we were so close to our deadline that it would have been impossible to recreate that exact footage. So instead we just worked on sound in all the scenes we still had to give it a bit more life.

To create Milly, Marvin and Malcolm we used small plasticine blobs on a whiteboard. The whiteboard featured all of the background and imagination aspects, whereas the plasticine simply showed the character's position. Sound was also very important in this piece as it gave the on screen violence an innocence. For example when Milly is introduced people shout "MILLY" in a very childish kind of way which is typical of children's television programmes. Its is this that helps Milly, Marvin and Malcolm stay within the borders of our target audience, this being children between 3 and 13.

New Storyline Idea

Lucy died at a very young age due to an accidental death in the orphanage in which she was attending, but little known to the public eye is that the Orphanage holds a dark, dark secret, that in fact the death wasn't accidental at all. it was murder! Now Lucy's soul walks the grounds of the Orphanage as she can not pass over to after life until she finds out the truth about her murder. Lucy is lost, confused and lonely. The only living being Lucy can communicate with is the Orphanage Cat. Just lately strange happenings have been occurring at the Orphanage such as books being flung across the room. food going missing and doors slamming all by themselves. The question is will Lucy ever manage to unravel the secret of her own murder or will she forever walk the corridors of the old battered Orphanage?