ponanza

Be a Dog! A clay one!

During the process of making an animatic, the involved persons are usually faced with two major questions. First: Do the story and storyboard, which took months to create, still work when it is acted out with real people trying to perform the movements that are later going to be transferred to our characters? Second: How on earth are you supposed to play a dog or coyote in a nocturnal desert landscape, which, to make matters worse, is made of clay?

We were longing for answers. Thus, on a holiday, we dragged ourselves into the video lab of the university, put some chairs in front of a bluescreen to represent rocks and cactuses, and transformed into a coyote…

…also into dogs. Lots of them.

 Big and small ones, fat and thin ones, stinky dogs and It-doggies, mean yapping ones and relaxed muchachos. We were filming “Pre-Ponanza”, cut it, added some borrowed snippets of movie soundtracks – and found answers.

First: The storyboard is working… by and large. Second: Puppets of clay don’t get sore muscles. But we do.

 All in all the results of our second animatic production were humbling and motivating at the same time. Humbling because we realized that we ended up 90 seconds over the intended length, although some scenes were still to be added. Motivating because a lot of the scenes unfolded their humorous effect already in this abstract form and the dramaturgical structure of the story proved to be stable.

With only little time left until the start of our production-phase, there are still plenty of things left to do, we have to complete the storyboard and the scene-script by testing it via the animatic-clip and we have have to decide, what additional scenes we’ll have to plan and what scenes will be deleted from the first. This is one of the main differences between stop-motion filming and traditional video-production: We need to have the complete movie finished inside our heads, before we even start filming. After all, we have only a short number of days on which we can film , so we won’t be able to improvise scenes. But that’s the point in making a stopm-motion movie: Befor one can sculpture a dog made of clay, one have to become a clay-dog oneself… Luckily we start filming in a few days… All that squichy pre-production mambo-jambo starts to pound heavily on our brains…

The technology behind Ponanza - Part 2

Special Effects

For the effects in Ponanza we’ll use Adobe After Effects as well as two marvellous additional programs: Primatte Keyer and Particle Illusion.

Primatte Keyer is a plug-in for After Effects to remove bluescreen from videos. With this program we can replace the blue background, that we’re shooting in front of, with any other background we choose. That way we can concentrate on the “earthly matters” during animation and add a sky later. To test the efficiency of the plug-in we used this picture with a complicated blurred background:

The quality of the Primatte Keyer amazed us. The blurred edges were no problem for the software. With just a few clicks of the mouse we achieved this result:

Particle Illusion is a program that generates “particles”. You can create realistic effects like fire, water, smoke, rain or snow with it. It’s a little more complicated to operate, but it also comes with a huge selection of presets that can be used instantly.

We’ll use it for desert dust and several other effects.

Practice makes perfect

The last days were spent with lots of animation training. What use are pretty sets and puppets if the animation is choppy? No one wants to see that, including ourselves.

So we just nailed a simple wire-armature, the “victim” of our tests, to a piece of set (don’t worry, it wasn’t harmed ). In addition we started a webcam and the program StopMotionPro, and off we went.

How our first attempts turned out, you better take a look yourself:

Since our coyote has to do a lot of walking and sneaking around in the canyon, we also tested some walks.

The most important lessons we learned during the test animation:
It’s advisable to attach the set elements to the set floor, cause it takes a lot of time to re-arrange them if they are accidentally moved.

Of course it is also hard to animate fluent movements. Not only do you have to move all relevant body parts of the puppet, but you have to take into account the distance to the last pose. If you also have to animate the facial expressions it’s going to be even more work.

Conclusion: We need to keep practicing!!!

A small step for puppetkind, but a big step for us

Today it was time to practice some animation. Our equipment were two laptops, two webcams, toy cars, action figures and clay. Most of the students animated for the first time. After the first couple of frames they became aware of the fact that animating our film won’t become an easy task. How far do I move the puppet? Oops, there was still a hand in the picture! How do you keep the puppet from falling over? Still a lot to learn…

With lots of patience the first small animations emerged: A little rubber puppet doing a somersault and two toy cars doing a wild chase around a bottle of water.

The following weeks everyone has to practice some more to become better at animation.