Thursday, 31 January 2013

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:

  

Tuesday, 4 December 2012

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!

Monday, 3 December 2012


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

Shark swimming test

water splash test