I went to Jericho beach park today, to gather some more reference material for trees. Ta (da).

My first idea, when considering the new 2D direction of this project, was to imitate woodblock printing in the aesthetic. This would be for a bunch of good reasons that i'm too lazy to get into. I'm still testing the concept; I may or may not do it.

I drew the wide field, and the far trees, and photoshopped them all together with the big tree. So, this is more or less the first shot of the film.

Here's a variation to illustrate what I mean. Try to ignore the nasty colour banding in the sky - these are just sketches.

Scene 1

This is how i'm picturing the opening shot - I haven't decided on the moonlight colour scheme yet though, just an idea. I plan to play quite freely with the framing and aspect ratio in this film; i.e. not all shots will be panoramic - probably just this one. I also plan to section off the frame now and again, sort of like a Japanese screen. In fact, 'Japanese woodcut print meets Japanese screen' is sort of the aesthetic i'm going for.

I MADE A TREE

I've finished an element aleady - it's a tree! The colors and photoshopping aren't final, but this is more or less the aesthetic i'm planning.

Another little study.

What's this? What am I doing now? Well, for a little while now, i've been toying with the idea of taking the current project and turning it into a 2D After Effects layers + pixelation type film. There are many good reasons for doing it this way, not the least of which is that I can do everything myself, which would be a decided advantage as has recently become apparent. To this end, i've been messing around with .jpeg frame compilers, photoshop, pixelation, etc. The above study is from two quick sketches which were photographed and photoshopped. Seems quite a speedy way to create images.

This would mean tossing out my existing set-design work, but who cares. I'm excited by the idea of not having to rely on anyone but myself to move forward.

READY FOR TO ROCK, PLEASE

The set has now been thoroughly designed, down to a shopping list of building materials. Now, I just have to build it. However, access to the studio may be limited for a week, so I may mock up another set before I start the sawing.

FINAL DESIGN

Here is the resulting set design, the drawing i'll actually take to the studio. All the little lines and scratchy notes are me figuring out the various camera angles, and the set adjustments resulting from camera location - i.e. I can't have a bunch of trees where the camera needs to be.

See - it didn't take many trees at all to fill the space. After finishing the mockup, I spray-painted all the objects to mark their location. I'll then be scaling the resulting 'drawing' down to about 14x11, which will be the final set design that i'll take to the shop. One catch with this whole process is that my mockup camera has a narrower field of view than Dave's camera, which is 64 degrees. However, I have taken this into account, because I am so goddamn smart.

'INTERIOR WOODS EVENING' Set Mockup

I mocked up the interior woods set with paper, tape, card, etc. As usual, it's quite enlightening - I learned quite a bit about how dense the trees should be, how wide the road should be, how high the bushes should be, etc. It's apparent that it's actually going to take very little to fill the field of view, and it's likely going to be quite easy to fill in the spaces with digital crap.

The Mask of the Red Death <#1298>

Dear Andrew Brown,

Thank you for submitting your film to Ouat Media Distribution, we are currently considering it for acquisition.
Please expect a response within 6 to 8 weeks.
We appreciate your consideration and support of Ouat Media Distribution.
Thanks again for your patience and we will contact you with our decision soon.

Sincerely,

Ouat Media Distribution



I received this email recently. Which is funny, because i've never heard of these people and I certainly didn't submit our film(s) to them.

Just another little study of how I envision the woods. Maybe a little less foggy, though.

T R I C K Y

So here's the challenge; our 'INTERIOR FOREST EVENING' set would look like this and would be about this large on 1:12 scale, i.e. too big (12' +). It could be done, but that kind of size would be a little excessive. The trouble is, how to represent the farther-away forest in a way besides simply building it to scale (see close-up image - it's the parts furthest away from the camera cone that i'm talking about). We could simply drop in a flat image with a bluescreen, but we track forward throughout these shots, so that may not fly.

So, i'm not sure what to do. However, my experience has been that it's remarkable to what degress you can b.s. a shot; i.e. we could just stick a couple of modular pieces back there to fill the space as need be, and the viewer probably wouldn't notice and continuity errors. But, shit, i'm not sure.

As usual, the proper step is going to be busting out the ol' camera and mocking up the set with cardboard. It's difficult to visualize the extreme distortion of a camera lens until you see it.

NEW STORYBOARDS

Here's some new storyboards - i've got pretty much the whole story thumbnailed out. but i've got the first 2/3 drawn in fancier version, right up until the point when the protagonist meets the jive-talking ape that teaches him the meaning of Christmas, and shows him how to slam-dunk.

Here's another highly-technical drawing.

THUMBNAILS

The real work of a project like this, I find, usually looks like this - not fancy drawings with fancy-pants fancy markers, but little nasty scribbles. Everything else is just polishing.

Here's the entrance to the woods!!! Oh boy!!

Here's a little map of the forest and some 64 degree camera angles. Boogaloo!

THE LEFT FORK

This is a little map of the forest path, specifically the left-hand fork of the road. This part of the trail will be a bit more overgrown/congested, the action will be faster, and the shots will be framed a bit tighter.

THE DUDE

Here's a little study I did of the dude and his kid. I guess he'll look vaguely like this; non-contemporary clothing, but not dated to any specific era - all natural materials like leather.

SET NUMBER 1

I've finished designing the first set - not too much to this one. Just the road seen on the opening shot, and the fields on either shot; see storyboard and marked area. I did a little sketch to determine how i'll approach constructing the basic structure, using standard sized building materials. The red lines illustrate a 64 degree angle of view, i.e. the angle of view of the lens of our camera. Hopefully i'll be able to bang this thing off in fairly short order.

Here's another little sketch I did. For the film.

S t o r y b o a r d s

Here are the storyboards for the first part, justbefore he gets into the woods where the marker is. Notice that the man looks exactly the same in every drawing; this is because I am number one awesome drawer guy.

'The Place"

Here's a big wide, partly aerial shot of the field, sort of like the view you'd have if you were wearing stilts or high heels. The perspective is a bit screwed and it doesn't have quite the layout i'd like, but i'm going to feed it through the ol' photoshop. Working digitally sure is handy - I have a lot more patience working with photoshop than scribbling with Pantone markers.

' T h e P l a c e'

As mentioned in a previous post, we've substituted the cedar grove of the original story for a big, ominous field with the remains of some sort of structure(s) in it. The little sketch shows the view of our main character when he comes upon this place. The map shows the scale, and the (rough) camera angle. Obviously we don't intend to build a set this large; we'll be using digital smoke and mirrors.

Here's an idea of what i'm visualizing for the opening scene - an abandoned road leading to a grove/forest.

Try to ignore the crappy Photoshop job.

THE APPROACH TO THE STORY

I've been doing lots of thinkin' and sketchin' and head-scratchin', developing our approach to this story. Here's what i've come up with.

I've replaced the path through the rice paddies with an overgrown abandoned road, that leads to an ominous-looking forest/grove of trees.

I've replaced the grove of cedar trees, where the murder took place 'one hundred years ago' with a wide field, in which are seen the remains of a complex of buildings, weathered done to little more that outlines on the grass. The implication is that the 'murder' was tied to some sort of larger historical or political event.

I've done concept sketches illustrating these ideas - i'll post some of them as soon as I can get access to a scanner.

The Story

It looks certain that we are going with this story; it's short, has only one armature, and is choke-full of landscape/digital composite goodies.

Here's a summary of the story (posted in full in the previous post):

Guy has a dream.

He's carrying a blind kid on his back along a road.

Kid acts all creepy like he knows something.

They come to a crossroads. Kid says 'go left'.

They come to a grove of cedar trees.

The kid says, 'this is where you murdered me one hundred years ago'. The end.

I'm digging this story quite a bit. It's short, it requires only two armatures, and a large part of the backgrounds required could be acheived with composites and CG work. I have to pass it by Mike Addison first, but I think he'll dig it.

The Third Night

I had this dream.
I was carrying a child of six on my back. I’m sure it was my child. Only, the strange thing was, before I realized it he was blind with a freshly shaven head. When I asked, “When did you lose your sight?” he replied, “What? Long ago.” There’s no doubt that voice was a child’s, but he spoke like he was an adult. Like an equal.
Green rice paddies were to the left and right. The road was narrow. The fleeting shadows of herons could be seen in the darkness.
“We’ve started toward the rice paddies, haven’t we?” he said on my back.
I turned my face to the rear and asked, “How do you know?”
“Aren’t the herons crying?” he answered.
Sure enough, when he said that, they cried out twice.
Although he was my own child, I became a little frightened. With him on my back I didn’t know what would happen from here on. I wondered if there weren’t some place I could just abandon him. When I looked out into the darkness and I could see a large forest. Just as I started to think “If over there…” a voice going “Hee hee” came from my back.
“What are you laughing at?”
He didn’t answer. All I heard was, “Father, am I heavy?”
“You’re not heavy,” I replied.
“Soon I’ll become heavy.”
I kept quiet and, with the forest as my guide, walked toward it. The road in the rice fields twisted irregularly. We couldn’t exit as easily as I had thought. After a while the path forked. I stood at the split in the road and rested.
The boy said, “There should be a stone standing here.”
Sure enough, an eight inch square stone stood about waist high. Written on the face, “Left Higakubo, Right Hottahara.” I could clearly see those red letters in spite of the darkness. They were like the red color of a newt’s belly.
“Left will be fine,” the boy ordered. When I looked left the forest was starting to cast dark shadows from the sky over our heads. I hesitated a little.
The boy added, “You don’t need to hold back.” Helplessly I started walking toward the forest. I was thinking that the boy seemed to know everything, even though he was blind. When the single road approached the forest, he said on my back, “Being blind is a real inconvenience.”
“But it’s okay, because I’m carrying you.”
“I’m sorry you have to carry me, but to be made a fool of by people won’t do. To be made a fool of by a parent, especially, won’t do.”
Somehow things had become unpleasant. I was thinking how I wanted to hurry to the forest and dispose of him, and I hurried.
“You’ll understand when we get a little farther.—it was just like this night,” he said on my back, like he was speaking to himself.
“What was?” I asked, with intensity in my voice.
“What was? You know, don’t you.” the child answered with a sneer. And then I got this feeling that I did. But clearly I didn’t know. It was just that it felt like it happened on a night like this. It felt like if I just went a little farther, I would know. Knowing would be very difficult, so while I didn’t understand I hurried to dispose of him. I had to feel relief. I hurried.
Rain had been falling for some time. Little by little the road darkened. It was almost like a dream. But this small kid was sticking to my back, and he illuminated my entire past, present and future, shining like a mirror that didn’t miss an ounce of the truth. Yet, he was my child. And he was blind. I couldn’t stand it.
“Here, here. Right at that cedar’s roots.”
I could clearly hear the kid’s voice. Unconsciously I stopped. Without noticing we had entered the forest. Just five feet in front of me was a black mass. Without a doubt, I could see it was the cedar tree the kid had spoke of.
“Father, it was at that cedar’s roots there, wasn’t it.”
Without thinking, I replied, “Yes, it was.”
“I think it was 1809, the year of the Dragon.”
Of course, I was made to think of 1809.
“From today it’s been exactly one hundred years since you killed me.”
As I heard those words, one hundred years ago, the year of the Dragon, on a dark night like this, by the roots of a cedar, the realization that I murdered a blind man abruptly burst into my mind. And as soon as I started to become aware that I was a murderer, the child on my back suddenly grew as heavy as a stone Jizo statue.

IT'S ALL OVER

Well, it seems to be settled. The behemoth project 'The Hell Painting' is going to be put on indefinate hiatus. It doesn't mean that all the work done on it will be thrown away - I really like many elements of the story.

The plan now is to start something new, and small. I was thinking of making it an excersise in speed - let's see how fast a short stop-motion animation peice can be produced. That doesn't mean that I intend to make it shoddy, however. I just plan to move forward quickly with minimal dicking around. It will also be fun to document a project in its entirety, from conception to finish.

I'm currently working my way through a mass of short stories, mostly in the fairy/folk tale vein. I'll post a few of the contenders that i've found so far.

WE'RE THINKING OF QUITTING

We are seriously considering the idea that our project might just be too damn big.

Conservative estimates, based on myself putting in 24 hours per week, places our production completion date six years away, which has an unfortunate ring of truth. I would be thiry-three. We don't really like the sound of that. We would be pretty disappointed to put 'The Hell Painting' on indefinate hiatus, as we have quite a bit of enthusiasm for the thing. However, if we have to cut our losses, prolonging it obviously won't help. It wouldn't mean quitting stop-motion animation, however; I would start immediate work on some sort of 1-2 set public domain fairytale piece, 2-3 armatures, no moving faces, all narration, one year ETA. But we're going to sleep on it before I smash our $2500 giant fancy dusty set.

C R A P B O T 9 0 0 0

Here it is! It doesn't work!! Because it's a piece of crap! My initial attempt was a 'constructive learning experience'. The next one is going to better, in that it's going to work. It worked to some degree, but was just too glitchy - all the glitches were adding up, and it was a ways from being done.

ROBO HEAD 2.0

Robo-Head V. 1.0 is a bust. I will post pictures of the hunk of crap, along with reasons why it failed, soon. It turns out that making an animatronic head from things you can buy at a hardware store is hard!

In the meantime, i've been sketching out a design for a new head, based on research and knowledge gained through my initial failure. So far, i've got the mechanism for eye movement designed.

MORE BOARDS

More storyboards, hooray!! These are the old version 2.0 boards, but this scene still stands as is. This is when Cornelisz stomps into the court of Lord William of Orange and demands that a carriage be burned for him - a model for his painting.

ROBOT HEAD

I'm working hard on the big head. The thing really is a robot - the functions just happen to be controlled with threaded steel rods instead of electronics. Its getting more and more complicated - there's a huge nest of cables coming out the back, and quite a criss-crossing of guy wires holding the thing in place. On a project like this, there's a point where things can get so complicated and begin to affect other funtions in unpredictable ways that the whole thing ceases to work. Hopefully it won't get to that point.

I'm also working with fiberglass and resin. I had forgotten how annoying the stuff is to work with.

Total days so far on Johanne's Big Head - 5. Estimated hours spent - 30.

I'll post some pictures of the thing soon.

Here's the complete storyboard for the final scene of our film. Note: we've scrapped the monkey, because we don't like monkeys.

I've got nothing to say, beyond that i'm impatiently waiting for my three-days-off-a-week life to begin so I can really start working on this thing. I expect to have the 'robot head' up and running in very short order.

Michael Addison has been working on honing the animated storyboard for the two scenes involving our exterior studio set - after this, we'll move on to shooting reference footage for the animation, so we can cheat. We intend to rely on cheating as much as possible with the animation - its never been our strong point.

Here's some more story boards for you panting, unwashed masses who can't get enough! Chew on these for a while!

Face Robot

Dave 'Ninja Fingers' Sikma posted these here neat-o pictures of our head armature, version Mark I. The jaw goes up and down, as do the eyes. Both are controlled by threading the 1/4" rod seen in the back in and out, which is then attached to i's respective mechanism via 1/16" aircraft cable. This is some serious NASA-shit we got going down here.

Just as I foresaw, the only way to approach the thing was to just pop a big-ole drill bit in the old keyless Makita and have at 'er. The eyes move quite smoothly; they're held in place with elastic cords; the same cords also pull the eyes to the extremity of their upward movement - the cable pulls it to the other extremity. The thing is a bit freaky looking.

Progress should be rapid in the future - this represents about a day and a half of work, and i'll have a whole three days off every week in the near future.

BLAH

I've gone down to working four days a week again; hopefully that'll free up enough time to get our 'big heads' completed in a timely manner. We're hoping to get out of our present studio after the winter, in order to move into a closer space (our current space being a three hour round trip on the bus). I have no idea if we will be able to finish with our current set in that time frame - there is an awful lot of work to be done.

Dave cleaned Loomis Art Supplies out of 'superflex sculpy' today, a task he was able to accomplish despite being lazy.

THE BIG HEAD

Inital progress on big head #1 is encouraging - progress has been reasonably rapid. So far i've accomplished the following: sawed off the back of the skull, installed elastic cords in the jaw, and attached a cable to the jaw. This cable will then run to a bolt which will allow us to pull the cable incrementally by loosening or tightening it.

We tested out the good ol' Superflex Sculpy last night; we've determined that it will work. It is, for the unitiated, a modeling clay that is then baked hard - this particular type of Sculpy retains flexibility after baking, which is the key.

Now I have to tackle the eyes and eyelids. It is going to be hard. There will probably be swearing involved.

We should be doing a few little animation tests with the unfinished head reasonably soon - i'll post the results.

This here is what i'm talkin' bout; I have to make the big heads do stuff like this. Here's Conelisz, the evil painter, getting all excited and creepy.

Well, we now finally have a skull (after the two that Michael R-addison ordered never showed up, i.e. we we're robbed). Now I have to figure out how to build this monstrosity; how to go about this is yet to be determined. The idea, for those of you haven't read the pertinent earlier post, is to build an almost-life sized armature head for our characters; an 'armature head' in the sense that we'll be able to pose the features incrementally to create neat things like feelings and stuff. The snivelling nerds will then animate these heads and then digitally transpose them onto our 9.5" armatures, using teamwork, sharing, and working together. There is a long list of challenges for myself: how to make the eyes move, the jaw, the eyebrows, and at least a few of the muscles involved in smiling, frowning, etc, and what materials to use to accomplish all of these things - and no space-shuttle crap; I have to but this stuff at hardware stores.

I do like to design and plan before I jump into anything, but this seems to be case where I simply have to have a whack it to decide the best way to do it. This inital attempt might very well be a botched one.

The first head armature is going to be Johannes, the apprentice to the painter - I managed to locate one particular reference image of a young man that suits our needs, after having looked at thousands. I'd show you the image, but I stole it from a fantastic artist, and it would be a copyright violation. So screw you, you'll just have to wait to see what I come up with.

WE'RE BACK

We're doing stuff again! We are now the proud owners of a brand new plastic skull! That's right kids! We're going to turn into a life-size head armature, and then digitally impose onto our regular armatures to make them talk! Or this is what the nerds insist that we can do. Besides doing this, i'm researching funding sources; specifically grants. Because I think its cool that the government can can take your money by force and then give it to us so we can buy plastic skulls. Because, by buying plastic skulls with your money, we're culturally enriching you - whether you like it or not, you blue-collar classic-rock-listening slobs!

We haven't done anything in a while because we're lazy worthless bastards!

I'm currently obsessed with learning to play Celtic guitar, which is taking up all my available obsessiveness; i'm sort of like a bull with a red cape - I fixate on one thing and charge at it. And, I savagely gore people and then trample on them.

Design of the bird armature continues; at some point i'm just going to have to start fiddling around with it - its impossible to design it to perfection until you have the actual materials in hand. This first crow might be a write-off - i'm sure design flaws will become apparent when its done and in use. I really should be working on the large-head armatures, but we're still waiting for our 5"x3.5"x3" plastic skulls to arrive in the mail. Until then, this will keep me busy.

I've been doing research on the 3/4 life-size scale raven armature. Here's my rough plan for the armature. Rockon.