Animatic for '13 truths + 1lie', showing the rough keyframes for movement

Hidden Stories

Throughout the course of the project my idea had changed several times. Originally, I planned on making my film with paper cut outs, as described in my earlier posts, however when it came to animate with them I realised it wasn't going to work due to the complexity of the model and the way it made the horse's movement look stiff and wooden. My next reaction was to make the film hand drawn in Flash, which I experimented with making movement cycles

However I really didnt like the hard lines and colouring flash offered, so I decided to start the whole thing again hand drawn on paper.

At this point I had also decided to change my story almost completely.. my original storyboard was this - 

I eventually came to really hate it though and i started the storyboard over

The story is supposed to be that the 'spirit' of the carousel horse wakes up and goes to join the 'white horses' in the sea waves

This was somewhat inspired by various folk tales about the white foam of broken waves to be herds of white horses leaping out of the sea. This idea has been used in a few films and books

Clip from 1982 animated film "The Last Unicorn", where the unicorns are imprisoned in the sea.

White Horse of Zennor by War Horse author Michael Morpurgo, about a magical white horse that comes from the sea foam

I made this decision pretty late on in the project though and as a result didnt have as much time to animate and edit as I should have. The outcome I feel is poor quality and i am not happy with it...

resources + inspiration

 

Hidden Stories project

for this project we have to select an object from one of the Edinburgh Museums and Galleries, to base a short film upon. Feeling uninspired after visiting the museum of edinburgh, peoples story and the writers museum, eventually i came to the museum of childhood and found this gorgeous carousel horse, who i believe if his ribbon is anything to go by, is named Alf. 

Here are some sketches I did of him in the museum: 

I have yet to develop a proper story, but it will be centred around this horse as the primary character. I was thinking about how I could animate this - with such an intricate design it would be far too time consuming to do the entire thing hand-drawn, so in order to actually get it done I will have to adopt a different approach. I was thinking about stop motion, but I think it would be far too much work to figure out how to make a working 3d model for what I had in mind, in addition to the fact that i would have no idea what i was doing... 

Rachel suggested I look at paper cut out stop motion, like the type used in Jiri Trnka's Merry Circus. 

I started to design an articulated paper doll I could use to animate with. This is the first one I made to test how it works.

After some refining I have created a template for a model which I think should work:

I'm thinking about either decorating it by drawing the design digitally, or using fabrics, inks, and beads etc (or a combination of both). I will need to find a way to connect the joints so they move effectively.

other images:

  

the finished product !

i set it to some music by massive attack (intro to 'inertia creeps'). youtube distorted the sound a little at the end  though. I put all my clips together using imovie, its maybe not the most professional tool but it did the job ok. i would have liked to play around with the editing more than imovie allows but this will have to do for now!

a little something i did for another project (an element of risk/gold project). I used this guide by Richard Williams to help me.

The background is a painting i made and manipulated with photoshop.

some sketches to help me plan out my frames