Helping our characters to stand!!

We have had a delay on filming recently due to a difficulty with our character models. The main character Lucy wouldn't stand up on her own without legs that were difficult to shape. With this issue we had to consider the different ways in which we could support our characters without having ridiculously disproportional legs. Although we have managed to get the balance right to support her using wire wrapped in tape and covered in plastacine, we have created a few ideas to support characters over the scenes. In the park scene Lucy can be supported by putting wire through her feet and spiking them into the ground, this will make it easier to create body language while walking rather than having to balance her everytime. As for the town scenes we could use weights or magnets in the feet connected to wire or metal poles to help maintain a blance during movement.
Similar problems arose with the orphanage owner as her body is rather large in comparison with her short stumpy legs, to resolve this we will show her behind a pedestal for the majority of the short film, when she dismounts from the pedestal towards the end of the piece, she could have weights at the bottom of metal poles to allow her to stand.

Poster Designs

Over the past week Hannah and I have been been experimenting with Adobe Illustrator to design some poster ideas. We both decided to come up with one design each for now to allow us to get to grips with the software. The results showed how myself and Hannah took completely different routes with contrasting thoughts and ideas. Where my idea takes a mysterious effect into account using an almost fog like shading to create a mist over "Lucy Firr" with a simple focus on the character and title of the animation, Hannah's takes on a much more artistic approach involving the title being pronounced with many features which almost combine magic and fantasy with the dark genre of horror.

I believe that our poster designs appeal to our target audience well. Mainly becuase teenagers will be draw in by the dark mysertous poster which reveals little about the storyline and therefore entices people to find out more about it. Whereas Hannah's design will draw in those in love with a magical escape from reality.

Please leave comments on what you like about each of the posters and what you think could be changed about it. All comments are appreciated. Thankyou.

(Left) My Design / (Right) Hannah's Design

We have previously been writing the poem that will be featured throughout the short-film, so far the first stanza has been completed, it sets the scene and background of the characters and their lives.


There once was a girl named Lucy Firr
Who never moans, never causes a stir
She lived in an orphanaged and that's where she'll stay
The shame is her firends never ask her to playThey just run about their childish deeds
Without a thought or glance as this girl recedes
Into the darkness isolated and alone
While the orphanage owner sits high on her throne
The orphanage owner is horrible and fat
Lucy's only true friend is the orphanage cat
He pays her attention he'll let her come play
And in turn for his comfort she allows him to stay
High up in the orphanage inside a small room
Lucy and the cat will play in the gloom
Rather than games such as hide and seek
Lucy would rather play torture the weak
She scares the children with spiders through floors
And howling loudly at night throwing novels at doors
The orphanage children who are frozen with fright
Lie aware of the things that go bump in the night

As we continue to write our poem we have fod a very useful site to aid us in any difficulties with rhyming.
http://www.rhymezone.com/
Take a look at it yourself if your a budding poet.

Coraline synopsis and textual analysis

Coraline is a feature length, stop-animation film based on the children's book of the same name. Originally written by Neil Gaiman and adapted under director Henry Selick for the purpose of the movie, the story is about a young girl named Coraline who is ignored by her busy parents. After moving into a new house she discovers a small door containing a tunnel leading to a house that seems identical to her own. These assumptions are short lived after Coraline meets her 'Other Mother' and 'Other Father' along with the improved, fun and entertaining house. At first this new world seems perfect until she's asked to replace her eyes with buttons. After rejecting the offer the world around her starts to deteriorate and show it's true colours, once Coraline has left this world behind something terrible happens, her parents have disappeared. Following the sighting of her parents in a mirror Coraline knows exactly where they are. Now Coraline has to go back to her other mother and find a way to win them back.

In terms of mise-en-scene, this is where the film really flourishes. In reality Coraline's house is very dim, it is portrayed with dull shades of white, grey and brown exacerbated by low-key lighting. The Kitchen seems barren of food and the bedroom features very few home comforts such as a photo of friends and a string of birds around Coraline's bed. Her fathers office is full of unpacked boxes and a dated computer on which her father is droning away with bags under his eyes to show how tired he is. All of these contribute to the very dim outlook on their life. As nighttime arrives the rooms become very dark using chiaroscuro lighting. To show the connection between the real house and the 'other house' Coraline goes through a tunnel consisting of entrancing purple and blue lighting, almost as if to show that something magic is happening.

In contrast to the real house, the 'other' house feels a lot more "homely", the kitchen is full of food and flowers while the other mother is cooking a roast "just in time" for Coraline's arrival. The use of color shows warmth with orange and blue as apposed to the grey cracking walls of the real house. The study has crooked and disproportionate frames on he wall showing an element of German expressionism. Replacing the dated computer in the centre of the study is a piano with moving hands which plays itself by controlling the other fathers hands showing creativity through music rather than documentation. Coraline's bedroom features live toys giving the room the home comforts that it was lacking before along with that portrayal of fun and excitement.

Moving on to camerawork and editing, an establishing shot shows the house at the beginning of the scene to let the audience know where the scene is going to be set. A mid shot is used to show the family around the dinner table, showing the body language of the three characters. There is a comic effect that come from a close-up of the food being served and a tilt up to show Coraline's disgusted reaction. There is a graphic match between Coraline slumping back onto the chair and then the bed. As night time falls and mysterious events start happening the entire scene is shown with a subtle canted angle to make the audience feel unnerved until Coraline opens the small door were there is a close-up to show her reaction to what she sees followed by a reveal shot of the tunnel.
Later in the other fathers study, while playing the piano to the music the camera spins around the scene as does the other father and piano, adding a sense of craziness to the other world. Then as Coraline goes to bed there is another graphic match between the bed in the other world and the bed in the real world to blend the two scenes almost making it seem like it was all a dream.

The sound in Coraline is heavily influential on the mood, while the scene is being set a calm and tranquil sound is playing, the track resembles a peaceful yet adventurous tone which matches Coraline's character. As the happenings in the night occur there is a much more fast paced track with wind and brass instruments building up to a crescendo, this creates tension before the opening of the door to the other world. The song played by Coraline's other father is centred around Coraline and the lyrics start with "making up a song about Coraline", it's an upbeat fast tempo song played on the piano which gives off a happy aura. Once Coraline enters her bedroom there are diagetic sounds of the birds wings flapping along with the speech "hello Coraline, hello, hello, hello" this once again centres the focus of the other house around Coraline's happiness. At the dining table of the other house the merriment of dinner is short lived when the other mother mentions playing hide and seek in the rain, when Coraline asks "what rain" there is a sudden crash of thunder and a flash of lightning which silences any other sounds and draws the audience to the realisation that there's more to this other world than meets the eye.

Our schedule...

We have Put together a schedule of what we need to be doing over the next five and a half weeks, the blank white spaces have been left for a chance to catch up on any missed or delayed work.

Deadlines

We now have a deadline for our finished project which means we have to develop our own deadlines for pre-production, filming and post-production.
Our deadline for pre-production is Monday 16th November, our deadline for filming is Friday 4th December and our deadline for post-production is Friday 18th December.

Movie Poster Research

We have been looking at different movie posters for the Genre of our animation so films such as Coraline, The Nightmare Before Christmas and 9.

Coraline, as part of it's promotion had all the letters of the Alphabet come out as Posters featuring different Characters and settings of the film. This was appealing to their target audience of children. We could incorperate these ideas into our poster but since we are only making one we could incorperate introducing the characters into one poster and also attracting our target audience.

This is the main promotion poster for Coraline which shows the genre of the film and introduces the main Character Coraline herself. The dull dark colours contrast with the bright light giving an insight inro what the movie will be like itself.

This is the promotion poster for The Nightmare Before Christmas, this is more our genre and we are going to incoperate the lighting in our poster and the style of the text used which gives it that creepy gothic look.

This is the promotion poster for 9 which is the new Tim burton film which came out recently this once again fits in our genre for the dim dark lighting and the colourless settings with the contrast of a bright colour to show different emotion and life.

Town setting complete

The overall town setting is now complete, the roofs were made out of black card, and taped together to be easily removed and the cobbled street effect and well were premade. The cobble streets were created by using printed paper with the cobbles on it and the well was from a model shop.

High level, high angle shot of the town

The left side of the town

An open plan version of the town

Close-up of roofs

 

Close-up of cobbled street

The finished park

The park setting is now complete, with the tree and bench finished and placed on top of the hill the only thing missing is the backdrop of the moon. However the backdrop could infact be created using lighting, the setting could be placed in a dark area and artificial lighting could be used including a lamp acting as a spotlight to symbolise the moon. Using a lamp as the moon would also keep the shadows in the correct place giving it a sense of realism, one drawback of this method would be that the lighting on some possibly crucial areas may be lacking not to mention the facial features of the character would be hidden.
In terms of construction, the tree was made out of wire twisted together then branching out, I then shaped the lone sections of the wire in a twisted and flamboyant way to create that almost 'Dr Zeuss' like shape. I then drybrushed a dark brown acrylic onto the wire to give it the correct colour. Although we considered covering the tree in plastacine, we decided that the wire gave an interesting look and continues with the 'twisted reality' look we are going for.

The top of the hill

The entire park

Looking up the path

Park base completed

The park setting is nearing completion as the entire model is coated in model grass and gravel. Along with this we were thinking about what to use for the bench and tree shown in the design pictures. We had considered building the bench out of wire or wood but it would have been difficult to achieve the look we were going for. I then found the perfectly innocet yet gothic bench in a model shop and although there were some doubts about the size and proportions to characters and settings, but luckily it fits perfectly ontop of the mound and Lucy's character model fits nicely.

The overall setting

Close-up of bench

Following the path from the top

The Park - Adding the colour

There has been a large delay in the construction of our park setting as during rolling out the plasticine to coat the scene, we found that a whole block of plasticine would only roll out to a very small area and that layer would be too thin. So due to this Hannah and myself have been looking at ways to coat the setting and still give it a reasonably professional look. We looked at clay, cloth and other kinds of patchwork fabric ideas all of which would have been too time consuming to fit into our deadline. This left us believing that we would just have to paint the hill and hope it looked alright when filming. However in the last hope I was looking around the local stationary store to find new solutions and found a new idea, this would involve coating the entire hill with green felt. After purchasing the felt and applying it at home I realised that the felt left seams or overlaps on show as we were only able to obtain A4 sheets of green felt.
Although the felt did provide us with the required shape and texture we needed to try and disguise the overlapping sheets so I decided to use model grass on top of the already textured felt to disguise it. I have only used one layer of ti so far on one side to test out how the glue will let it set but it will be completed soon.
We has left an are cut out for the pathway and seating area and to fill this used model gravel which after pouring onto glue and coating with a spray on diluted PVA glue set perfectly.
As you can see from the pictures below the pathway gets wider as it gets lower showing a distorted realiity in this world we are creating.

Here is the setting from the left side showing

 the first layer of grass and the gravel pathway

Here is a closer view of the pathway

This is the angle that this scene is likely to be shot at

A Bird's Eye View of the seating area on top of the hill

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?

Characters - extras

To make our animation feel more alive and therefore realistic, we have decided to make a minimum of 16 characters for our entire 5 minute short. We would prefer to have a minimum of 20 to really bring the animation to life but whether we create such a large amount of plasticine characters is still in debate. The factors that affect our decision are the time and materials needed to create them and the benefits to the animation, we need to assess whether creating so many characters would actually be worth it or whether we could achieve the same results using fewer models. A possibility to achieve those better results would be to make the framing of the shots closer so everything is a lot tighter in the shot and therefore making the shot look busier than it actually is.

Here are a few quick design ideas for another orphanage child and townspeople:

Orphanage child

Townspeople 1

Townspeople 2

Ideas for lighting!

To keep our light continuity we have decided to use artificial lighting so we do not get the natural light changes such as shadows created by the sun moving. This also benefits us in creating the mood and emotion which we want in our animation. Carrying on with the Tim Burton theme we can use different coloured light bulbs to create shadows and an eerie look, we would use colours such as a deep blue which we would use throughout the whole piece or a dark red for emphasis on dramatic moments. Using artificial lighting allows us to play around with shadows, by moving the flexible desktop lights we would be using we can manipulate the shadows to whatever we want, for example we could make the shadows long and thin to give that creepy gloomy look. We can also control the time of day using artificial so we can film things which would be daylight in the animation time but in real life it’s dark or vice-versa. We can also emphasis the moonlight which Tim Burton also does a lot in his work, this creates that gloomy, creepy look again. To make one of our characters look more sinister we could change the lighting so only half their face is lit up this could create a sense of fear and mystery where as if they were in fall light they would look more happy and innocent, this can help us create questions on Lucy by putting her in a darker light then the other characters. This will then make sense towards the end of the short film when the audience find out the climax of her actually being dead.

Moulds in the making!

This is some more progress on an Orphan from the Orphanage.

This is the Orphanage owner in progress and she is made from Polystyrene balls, a pipe cleaner and plasticine.

This is the start of a Orpan whom will be at the same Orphanage as Lucy as you can see it will be made from two polystyrene balls, a pipe cleaner and plasticine.

This is lucy's hair, which is also made from Plasticine.

This is Lucy from the front.

This is Lucy from the back in the process of having detail added to her, she was made by using 3 polystrene balls a pipe cleaner and different coloured plasticine.