Fabric Shopping + Tights

POSTDATED 21/02/12

Today I went fabric shopping with my costume designer, looking for fabrics to make some of the costumes to make. Also, on her recommendation, I bought some blue tights from eBay, for the blue screening process we are planning to use for the goat legs. Here is me modelling them;

For, you know, when I need to rob a corner shop and coordinate my wardrobe.

And here is a blue screen test. It worked with some success. It's still obvious where the legs are, because the lighting is different between the plate and the keyed out image. But I think this has more to do with the changing lighting on a cloudy day, which could be controlled better.

We looked at a range of fabrics for the girl's dress, as well as some synthetic fur for the goat legs - which I also picked out for use on my wolf.

Wordy on Wafers

POSTDATED - 19/02/12

Today was the big day, which ran with the usual pamphlet construction, which this time came via the assistance of a new-found poetry hammer (patent pending).

Up the stairs...

You will find...

 ...our crazy...

 ...beautiful...

...sexy poets 

...and Josh. N'awww.

Glamorous Norwegian Assistance

POSTDATED 17/02/12

Today, with a little help from my beautiful Norwegian friends to fill in the gaps, I sketched out the monster design on the sheet, and painted it in with black acrylic. I tried to give the monster a sinewy textured look, rather than it being simply colour in flat. An effect I accentuated by adding some flicks of paint to contrast the orderly neatness of the letters. The idea being it's the chaos battling against order, a poetic sentiment, non? I'll go get my beret...

 

Monsteration!

POSTDATED - 16/02/12

That's 'monster' + 'inspiration' by the way, in case that wasn't clear.
Anyway, I sketched up a final design for the FOP banner after a lot of paper scrunching, sent it on off to Kadhim and he was all 'hell yeah bro!'
Check it;

 So I headed off to Tesco to buy a king size single bed sheet (nothing less than kingly for our poetry events, I tell you.) to get some measurements. I then traced the image to figure out how it will fit on the sheet on the final thing. Hopefully it will look something like this;

Oooh, shiny.

POSTDATED 14/02/12

Today my armature arrived from John Wright. Money well spent, friends.

FOP banner designs

POSTDATED - 12/02/12

This time around for Fluent on Paper, I decided to play around with the banner design, using the same basic composition, but changing the solid block for some artwork. With this in mind, I had a fancy for drawing some kind of monster. Because... because. Monsters are cool. Below are my initial designs;

Kadhim decided that he liked the monster, but felt that the solid block needed to remain to create a sense of a brand (don't worry, we both cringed...), if only to keep the iconography the same for people who hadn't been to a Fluent on Paper event before.

These two designs I still wasn't happy about, so I left it at that for the day, to mull it over and hopefully come back with something better when I had the spare time to do it.

Tim Allen

POSTDATED 10/02/12

Tim Allen shall be discussed... later

Animatic

POSTDATED - 06/01/12

This week, with the Symonds Yat photos in hand, and not a lot else to do because I'm waiting on my armature to come back from John Wright, I decided to do a more detailed animatic. Until this point I hadn't really been able to do a proper animatic as I would have done for a normal stop-motion film, because all of my backgrounds are going to be live-action plates with the stop-motion composited into them, so doing an animatic, apart from to get a sense of pacing to the story, would have been more or less a waste of time. However, now that I have a potential location (pending Puzzlewood's availability/suitability) I decided to draw up a more fully detailed animatic based on the locations and ideas we discussed about composition and pacing whilst on those locations.

Symonds Yat

POSTDATED - 05/02/12

Today we planned to go to Puzzlewood as we expected it to be a great location for filming (they film some of the TV series Merlin there). Unfortunately we found the place closed on account of the snowy weather making the car park 'like an ice rink' so we had to come up with a plan B.
Plan B was to go a little further into the Forest of Dean and visit a place called 'Symonds Yat', which was free to enter, and offered a number of great locations. This being plan B actually gave me some experience of the practicalities of live-action filming that I didn't quite appreciate, being an animator. With external factors like weather being completely out of my control, having extra options for filming locations are invaluable because while we are still hoping to film at Puzzlewood, if this for some reason becomes impossible, by having a second option for locations my film can still be completed.
Below are selection of the Symonds Yat photos, taken by Aaron Child.

Armature+Finished Logo

POSTDATED - 30/01/12

Today my standard armature arrived from Animation Supplies, which I immediately sent on to John Wright, so that he can modify his armature to fit since he uses differently sized balls (9mm and 6mm for my project) to Animation Supplies, as well as silver soldering the parts together as opposed to using threaded bar and Loctite, as the Animation Supplies kits are designed for.

He told me when he receives my package he will begin work on the armature for me and that it will take no more than 10 days for my armature to be delivered to me. In the mean time, more live-action film stuff.

Today I also finished off my logo design for The Skeleton Fund, adding some colour and linework, whilst also leaving enough space for text to be added.

First I sent this off to Kadhim, but he thought the background was a bit too light, so he asked me to darken it slightly, which I did.

So it looks a bit more like this now.

And here it is with the final text, as per his facebook group.

The Skeleton Fund

POSTDATED 29/01/12

My friend Kadhim, who I run Fluent on Paper with, asked me to make a logo for his charity event The Skeleton Fund, where he is cycling from John O'Groats to Lands End with a replica human skeleton on the back of a tandem bicycle. He's hoping to break some sort of record and in the process he's raising money for the Rector's Scholarship Fund, which is a bursary for Imperial College students.

Initially, Kadhim asked me for a logo, with a tandem bike, a chest of gold pieces and a skeleton. I added the bike helmet because, yknow, safety first. Kadhim didn't really like the look of this in the end, so he asked for something without the chest, and the skeleton riding the bicycle.

"Something like this?" I said.

"Yeah," he said.

And that's pretty much exactly how it went down.

And here is my final design ready to import into Photoshop tomorrow.

"This is just, like, the Best Room!"

POSTDATED - 27/01/12

Today my film-making buddies and I set off to Celtic Prop Hire to spend a few hours looking around their warehouse for potential props for the live-action sections of my film. What we found was an absolute treasure-trove of props for almost anything, ranging from hospital IV bags, to terrible sci-fi props to rusty tin cans from probably the 1950s or earlier (that were still full!). Photos below by Scott Quinn.

 Lovely old books. Mmmm decay.

 Ky and Aaron getting all excited about cameras.

 Ready to eat!

 Doing some actual work.

 Acting...?

 Candlebras, also actually useful.

 I kinda hope it's not real blood in those.

 We were originally going to hire out the suits of armour we phoned ahead to ask about, but when we arrived, it turned out the suit of armour was more of a statue than a wearable suit, so not hugely useful to us. Still, kinda badass though.

 Lovespoons.

 Zap! Zap! Terrifying...

 Just what is the correct time, exactly, Aaron?

Ky looking wistful at the taxidermy sheep. I'm saying nothing.