ponanza

Baby Elephant Dog Walk

Peekaboo!

The first animation test with a raw version of one of our puppies is finished. Isn’t he lovely?

The puppets feet are too small to be attached to the set during animation, so we supported it from behind with wire and clay. Unfortunately the support wasn’t attached firmly enough and the puppet kept falling over during animation. But for a quick test the animation turned out ok. We just need a better support rig. After shooting the final scenes, every single picture will be edited on the computer to remove the visible supports.

Money - some have it, we don’t

Making a movie is a lot of fun, but also a succession of challenges.

After having found a room, the biggest challenge for us now is financing our film. We’re all working without salary, the usual way for a student project. Thanks to some gracious sponsors we were able to build part of the sets, but right now we’re broke again.

We’ve added a Paypal button to our blog (at the right side), so that it is possible to send us small amounts of money. If you want to support our project, please feel free to use it. Every amount is appreciated.

The the purposes we need money for include:

Sound effects: Since we’re making an animated film, every single sound has to be added afterwards. Good sound effect CDs cost up 300 $. We’re still searching for the best source, to be able to work cost-effective.

Webhosting: Even the internet isn’t free. Our website is causing monthly costs, which we have to cover.

Cost of material: We still need more materials for our sets and puppets. Wood, Styrofoam, Super Sculpey, Tools and other stuff have to be bought.

Everyone who makes a donation will be mentioned in the credits of our film. So please, open your heart and click on that button!

The people behind Ponanza

To step forth from the anonymity of blogging, we took a picture of our team.

Two of our female members are missing in the pic, but our main character joined us for the shoot.

Back again!

After enjoying semester holidays our team is back and ready to go on with our great film project! To have a better overview over the next steps and the whole project we began with a strategy planning day. Now we all know what kind of work needs to be done in every phase of the filmproject and who is going to be responsible for what part. The most important duties at the moment are getting a room for filming, our meeting every thursday afternoon, to find some nice music for the film and to design a press kit for finding new sponsors and new team members.

So let’s start working!

The pics are back

We didn’t pay the “ransom” to Zoto, but moved our pictures to Picasa. There you get 1 Gig of free space for photos. In addition to that, the web-album and software have more functions that are easier to use.

It’s gonna take a while till every single picture has been linked to the blog once more, but the most recent ones are back up again. To celebrate this we wanna show you a picture with the results of our previous work:

Our pictures were kidnapped

 Oh bugger! First Zoto, the provider we store our photos at, isn’t available due to maintenance work and now this…

They now charge money for their service and as long as we don’t pay our pictures don’t show up in the blog any more.  Now we have to decide wether we pay the “ransom” or move our pics to another provider. We already got lots of new photos waiting to be posted.

What would life be like without color?

We forgot to mention one of our sponsors before, so we wanna catch up on that. An art store, the Ideenhaus Siller & Laar in Augsburg, supplied us with several bottles of acrylic paint, that we have used a lot so far. All of our set-pieces like sand, rocks and cactuses have been painted with it.

Thanks a lot for this donation!

More music

We don’t have to worry about the instrumental part of our film.

After several composers already agreed to compose a score for us, we have now found professional help for playing the music. 

The Augsburger Salonorchester, a middle sized orchestra, is willing to record the soundtrack for us.

“Where words fail, music speaks”

To enrich our movie we asked several musicians whether they can write a soundtrack for our movie. A few of them have already agreed to do it, some of them are professional composers. But we don’t wanna tell to much right now.

One thing is certain: the DVD of our film will feature multiple soundtracks. That way the composers don’t produce the music in vain and the viewer profits from the musical diversity .

 P.S.: The title of this post is a quote from Hans Christian Andersen.

Family matters

We also used our last meeting before Christmas to discuss the character design. We came up with 10 different characters, from a female poodle to a chihuahua. This lead to some disagreement since not every team member had the same vision of the characters and their attributes. But we finally agreed on the basic designs.
A big issue was the question whether the dogs in the movie should be “all natural” or whether they should wear small accessories like a collar or a hat to emphasize the character. After some discussion we agreed on the accessories, since they will reduce the screen time needed to introduce each character.

After that all we had left to say was “Merry Christmas” and “see you in 2007”!