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…

One more professional helper

We found another helper in our quest to create a good film.

The 2D animator and comic-strip artist Felix Herzog is doing sketches for our character design. He already drew some of the main characters and we’re in the process of sculpting them in clay.

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”!

Everything is made of circles and boxes

Yesterday we started our meeting by celebrating Franziskas birthday, including a serenade (“…happy birthday dear - What’s-her-name-again? , happy birthday to you!” – we’ll need some time to memorize everyone’s names).

Invigorated by the tasty birthday cake we started drawing some character designs. Marco showed us some drawing basics on how to construct a character out of simple shapes and we watched a making-of of an animated movie. After that we armed ourselves with pencils and paper to draw some dogs and coyotes.

While doing that we analysed the story to find out which kinds of characters where needed, the different dog races and the character traits. A dog boss and a posh female dog (poodle?) will be among the cast.