Be a Dog! A clay one!
| Pre-production » Storyboard » Character design » Tests | No CommentsDuring 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…
discussions and debates
| Pre-production » Storyboard | No CommentsOur meeting yesterday was focused on discussions and organizational work. Maria reported that an art supplies store, the Augsburger Ideenhaus, was interested in sponsoring us. In exchange for putting their logo in our films credits we would receive craft supplies for building our sets and puppets. Marco found some big spot lights in his basement, so the lighting won’t be a problem either.
Max showed the first panels of the storyboard he made to the rest of the group. He had added some good ideas, but we can’t tell you yet. 
In the discussions lots of new questions started popping up. Does the dog boss sleep in a hut? What race does he belong to? Should he look majestic or laughable? Also, Marco noted that we need more obstacles in the plot that the coyote has to overcome, so the audience can empathize with him.
When the conversation turned to the set, we fell back to our biggest problem: We still don’t have a room to shoot in.
Still more questions and problems remained: Since we won’t get a big room to shoot in, we can’t build huge sets like they did on Chicken Run and other animated feature films. We have to rely on some technical tricks like “forced perspective”, which was used in a lot of animated productions already.
Then we talked about the visual style we were gonna use – realistic or stylized? We decided on a cartoony look, kinda like the old Warner Bros cartoons – only in 3D. To give us an example of what the characters could look like, Marco showed us a picture of a camel he once sculpted.
As an introduction to sculpting puppets we arranged a sculpting session on Sunday.
Finally we made a list of all the materials we’re going to need and discussed more possible sponsors.
