post productions

Everybody is really busy, despite the glorious summer weather. Moving images have been  edited to match the audio tracks we laid down weeks ago. We now know what makes us scared officially! Chickens! Spiders! Guns! Zombies!  The Dark! The list goes on. We need a few bits of original music to slot in – did you know occasional workshop mentor Ainslie has has some serious musical credentials (as well as have a top 10 single?

We now have official titles for the two films: Nightmares from Hell – these are the things which give us the heeby jeebies. We don’t even know why some of the time. Thomas Tells Tales is the best way we could come up with to focus on some real concerns. We could have got really dark, but that was going to be too owrrying for some of our filmmakers, so we went for the most empowering option – humour. There’s a park near to the school, which has had its once-excellent play structure burned to bits over a serious of attacks. It really bothers everyone who lives nearby and uses the park.

How people deliberately make  themselves look bother a lot of people in and around the school – we tried to capture that too – but again we sent down the route of exaggeration and humour. With a  mix of live action and animation, there are hundreds of shots here (and in the other movie too). We’re all happy to put our names to them!

scene by scene, move by move

The last few weeks have been very focussed. The scenes were broken down into their individual components – and some people got a bit of a surprise how much work goes into even a second or two of animation – and everybody had allocated tasks. There have been flickering flames, undulating cucumbers, sinister clowns, the odd zombie, creeping, crawling spider legs (and bearing in mind that SPIDERS were the prime fear of an awful lot of people, we’re amazed we got through these), and an awful lot more.

setting up for another session

The light boxes we constructed have proven very useful, as it means a number of stations can be animating at the same time (how else do you think we get through all the shots, you Mums and Dads reading this?)

At times there have been loads of  animation stations, with everyone hard at work.

rolling eyeballs!

Live action has also been on the cards, and luckily the weather held out on the days we had allocated for that filming … we might have some budding actors and directors here!  The serious kit that this takes – sound kit, cameras etc – has proven to be really interesting to some of the participants, and there has been plenty of time to find out how this all works.

Films taking shape

Last week we split into our two groups, and started working on the two film ideas.

Storyboarding options

The idea is to make two very different movies, with different styles of animation, plus some live action!

The group mentored by Madevi worked on storyboarding, which expanded  on the bare bones of the script which had been worked through the previous week.

monsters ...

This was quite an intense session, between the storyboarding and discussion points, but everyone worked very hard. The great things was that we got enough ideas to trial some live action ideas on film, with Ross taking the director’s role. Thomas took the lead role initially, and then Daniel provided the lead character for the final scenes.

The second group worked on audio for their movie, with groups of two discussing what frightened them … spiders and other long legged creepie crawlies seem to be responsible for many daytime and  night time fears. What we’ll do is marry our audio clips with animation.

What we’ve been working on is the beginning of the animatics, so we can finalise just what’ll be going on in the movies … it’s all very exciting!

Ideas taking shape

We’ve a had a few intense sessions now, trying to get the concept of the final movies to take shape: brainstorming the ideas of what it is that creates fear – why are we frightened or uncomfortable in some situations, what is it about particular people that makes others unsettled, and has that more to do with them or us.

We now have two distinct groups, with Madevi leading one and Rob leading the other, and we’ve been engaged in story-mapping the concepts. As a creative exercise, some ideas would need a budget close to Avatar’s, but we have the beginnings of some really strong scripts.

More information to follow …

Moving monsters

Well, the pictures are finally in. In the weeks before Easter, another batch of monsters were created, but this time instead of the large sized creatures for the pixelation tests – which were also to show just how careful you have to be when filming animation (no fingers, feet or heads in the shot, please!), various movies were created through different animation techniques.

Five bases were created, where different methods were investigated. The methods were:

cut-out animation, using a rostrum technique

shadow cut-out animation, using lightbox and overhead camerawork

zoetropes

flipbooks

stop motion animation

These sessions seem to go really quickly and brought it home to everyone how much work needs to go into even a small amount of animation.