Making stuff...

heres my atempt at makin the boat, i know what your thinkin, its too small and its made of cardboard...and you would be right, but i thought we could maybe use card as a base for paper mashe and then paint it or somethin; and about the size, well yeah i'll have to make a bigger one if people think it'll work. otherwise i guess another option is to buy a modle boat, but not sure where we would be able to get one to fit our specific requierments. any suggestions?



heres how bill is commin on...


I thought i would test out the floorboards for the cabin set, i used PVA glue to stick the single plie to cardboard and then painted it. i think its turned out well and feel we should use this method for the cabin. what does everyone think?



i stole James's pictures off the blog and had a little play about with the colours and saturation, this is what i came out with.

Here i added more of a green tint, trying to emulate the pirates of the carribien screen shot we used as reference in the pitch.


In this one i added a bit more blue to the last and toned down the saturation.


feedback for grace:
yeah those photos were a bit rushed today would be good to spend a bit more time and thought on them tomorrow. One thing i notice from the photos as they are, is that the background trees look too obviously 2D so we might have to make sure there lit less or/and more out of focus. otherwise i'm really liking the way the set is looking.

~ Dave

Today

Today we carried on with set building in general. Dave and I done some test shots with layers of trees and test lighting. Feedback appreciated. I want to do more lighting experiments with filters, shadows ect tomorow.

Tomorow i want to know if anybody else is going into uni, mainly James ( i text you )as he has the putty stuff for the armiture heads (and beads for eyes) and i want to make mine tomorow i am going into uni for about 11/12 leaving at 2 for dentist, will be in the stop mo room if you read this before tomorow James let me know if you have that stuff ect otherwise i shall just use plastacine for the time being.

Grace

hey peeps,

good work james, i love the top right one although it migh look a bit too tranquil and not quite creepy enough, looks awesome none the less though.

yeah grace, i should be up for that tomorrow. i'll see you at ron-puter's information download.

i've been tryin to get the shot list, duration, etc. sheet done tonight. its not gonna be completely finished for tomorrow but the bulk of its out of the way. also, i've worked a little more on Bills armature, tis getting there.

~ Dave

yo

Hey guys all is looking pretty good. James did you get that latex stuff?that could be good for the heads/faces maybe then we could add mouths, like Adam C was sayin' about plastacine with latex over it? and i think we have to have abit of lip sync n doubt wer guna get round to makin crocs ect. Also are we all going to the other photo tutorial dec 2nd i think tis?could be very helpfull if everybody knows the same amount of info on the cameras before we start shooting/ whilst we are shooting, will make life easyer.

Also i am planning on going into jm46 between rons lessons and after to do more set building hope you all can make it :)

Grace

Eat Your Greens...

Here is a very quck picture I snapped of our set today. It is not completed yet, and the photo is a wee bit blurry cos I didn't use a tripod but you get the idea. The content for now isn't important... I was messing about with digital grading in Paint Shop Pro to see what kind of hue, saturation and brightness we wanted. Take a looksy... (clicky = biggy).


Ok so we have from top to bottom, left to right:

- No adjustments
- Darkend with heightened contrast and a blue filter... simulates night
- Tinged with green... moist looking
- Sort of a lim greeny/yellow hue... sort of looks verdant and swamp-like
- Slight desaturation and pale blue overlay... bathed in a tranquil moonlight
- Almost entirely desaturated with hints of greenery... less vibrant, not as inviting

I don't know which I prefer of the above but these are just a few of many options... we'll have the addition of physical filters on-set as well so we could achieve pretty much any colourisation we desire, this was only a quick experimentation.

- James

I can't think of a witty title... Armature Test

Sorry its a bit late James, heres the test animation you did today.




~ Dave (the post) James (the vid)

feedback and what i've been up to...

Regarding the real .vs. hand made trees… I think what anon. meant was that sticks look like small trees not that the trees we’ve made look too small. I think it might be good to use a combination of the two. As mentioned before, Steven brought in some drift wood that would fit in well with the setting of our animation, but then again if this in turn doesn’t fit with the overall materiality of the set then it might be best to stick with the hand made ones.

Give him a big hand...
That hand is awesome. Not sure how to do the joints though. I just looked over a book I’ve got on stop motion and I’m really not sure how they do it, it doesn't mention anything about it as far as I can see. I know that now days they use latex a lot more, which would solve that problem. I think it might just be a case of smoothing over the cracks when using plastacine.

Shoppin' for Fishin'...
I can’t think of anything else we might need at the moment.

2D trees for the background...
James mentioned the other day about the possablity of using 2D trees to create further depth in the background, so I’ve made a few to see how they go.


Heres a test model of bills head…


adam mentioned it might be hard to animate a big character like the current design, so heres another possible design for bill, let me know what you think?



At Uni on Wednesday (I think it was) me and James went skip diving for materials. One thing we found was a box made of really thin wood, which will be perfect for floor boards and wood panels in the cabin. I was thinking we could maybe just stick them on to a cardboard structure, as it would be easy to make. I might test this out on Monday, unless anyone had any other ideas for the cabin.

And finally, I don’t know if anyone’s checked evil as sin lately but there’s a camera and lighting tutorial on wed so it would be great if the bulk of the set was done by then, so that they can help us with lighting the set in specific.

25th november
level 2
2 groups
10 to 12
jm046
dslr workshop

--------------------

2nd december
level 2 and 3
1 group of puppeteers only
10 to 12
jm046
studio lighting workshop


~ Dave