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.

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.

Soundtrack - Opening theme

In a media lesson on Friday we decided to create the song we will be playing during the opening scenes. After playing around with all kinds of different sounds on Garageband we managed to come up with a sound that we thought perfect for our almost Victorian setting and mood. This piece is featured in the video below along with a few photos of our modelling weekend.

As you can hear we selected clips from Garageband and arranged them to form a piano score. This music features notes from both high and low octaves and when put together sounds almost like a high pitched cry of misery from amongst powerful lower tones. This relates to our narrative as Lucy is almost crying out for attention amongst the monotonous drones of the townspeople.

Moulding day!

Me and Sam spent the weekend at my house working on our Animation figures, we made these by using polystyrene balls, one for the head and one for the body, though Lucy Firr has 3 balls in her. We connected these balls using a pipe cleaner through the middle of them. We then applied the coloured plasticine to the polystyrene balls and moulded the shapes of the dress'/outfits. The figures start our looking fairly basic but once there is detail added they start to come to life! So far we are in the process of making three characters these are the Orphanage owner Mz Popperlock, A fellow Orphan child called Richard and Lucy Firr herself.