Sculpting Solomon

14 hours to sculpt him up..
im happy with how he looks, the next step is to trial colours on him in Photo Shop.

Production PLan Banga Tron

One Tree - Production Plan

This project is going to be a stop motion animation.

Production Tasks

· Set building -

§ Sky Construction

- Acrylic paints

- It wont be animated

- SIZE - 4 metres L, 2 meters W

§ Hill Construction

- Basic hill form will be MDF wood, covered with a material then water putter to create a hard surface to sculpt on.

- The ground/ earth will be sculpted form earth clay

- Tie downs for the characters will be in-between the cracks in the earth.

- There will be two hills both with the same construction as above.

- 1^st will be for long shots, more of a cartoon shape. Steeper slope

- 2^nd will be for close in shots, this is where 90% of the animation will take place. This 2^nd set has less of a slope it’s more just the peak.

§ Tree construction

- The materials are not final, but options are:

- Sculpy

- Real tree branches

- Plaster

- Wire

- Foil

- Paint

- Paper (for leaves)

· Character building –

§ Armature construction

- Aluminium wire

- Knead it

- K&S tubing

- The wire will be 3 twists, with Knead it to hold the sections of the wire together. The K&S tube will be used so I can create individual sections eg. Arms, Legs, Spine and head. All the sections can be easily replaced it the wire breaks when I’m animating

§ Character Sculpt/paint

- Sculpy

- Plasticine

- Acrylic Paint

- The body will be divided into sections. Solid sections will be Scuply, eg. Fore-arms, stomach, chest.

The Joints will be plasticine so they can bend.

The plasticine will be colour matched to the paint on the sculpy, to make a seamless connection.

· Lighting-

§ Lights

- Thankfully Holmesglen will be providing me with a set of Dedo Lights, and I can hire the lights for an extended period of time.

- Dedo lights have a halogen globes. Naturally this will create a warm colour of light. The film is going to take place in the night so I will use gels that will change the colour of the light.

- I haven’t finalised the colour I wont, I’m thinking a cold blue or magenta.

§ Light set up

- The Dedo’s come in a set of three.

- I’m planning to use a lot of silhouettes so the lights will differ from the classic three-point lighting.

- To create a silhouette you need to back light the character. For those shots the majority of the light will be reflection off the “sky light”.

- For the other lighting I want it wont be fairly stylized, harsh shadows etc… I should only need one light on the character for this, but this I’m not sure about; some testing will need to happen.

· Camera/ software-

§ Camera

- Canon 400D DSLR

- Lens will range from a 50mm to 28mm.

- 50mm lens is used for close ups

- 28mm is a wider lens for long shots

- The 400D is the camera I own, but I am looking to purchase a Canon 7D. This camera is a higher quality, and has a feature called live view. Live view allows you to see what your about to shoot, it is an handy feature to have when your animating.

§ Software

- Dragon stop motion (animation)

- Final Cut Pro (Editing)

- After Effects (Compositing)

- Pro Tools (Sound)

Data Management

This will be my basic file structure. Inside both the After Effects folder and Dragon Stop Motion, will be scene folders.

Within the scene folders there will be shot folders and with that will be either the frames of the animation, or the after effects file.

§ The file name for a shot will be – OT_sc1sh1_take1.drg

§ The file name for a frame of animation will be – OT_sc1sh1_take1_001.jpg

Within the Final cut folder will be a running edit folder, containing the progressive versions of the edit.

Then when editing the final, I will have an offline edit, this contains files that are copressed so render times are less.

When the offline edit is complete I will replace the offline files with online files.

Online files are full resolution (1920x1080).

Back-up Plan

After a day of shooting my computer will run a routine Time Machine back up, this will update an external hard drive with the current files I have on my computer.

As well as that I will have another hard drive, that I will also copy the new files of that shoot. This hard drive will be kept separate form my computer room.

Depending on cost, I will have an online back up server that I can store files on.

Having these three back ups should keep me safe form any disaster that may occur.

some images that got my ball rolling

first comment

Ok... here is where im at.
i have written the script and now designing the character. there have been no technical problems as yet to be able to achieve the film. a few things need to be tested, like....

character animation and armature design

Clouds..

and the wind socks

for all of these things i have solutions they just need to be tested.

blog blog blog
yarda yarda yarda..

ill be back soon.
cheers