27 July 2013

The Making of The Piper Part 2

Hi guys welcome back to the making of my final graduation film The Piper. In my last post I gave you a insight into the per production work and in this post I will cover the making of the Puppets, set, props, and animation.

 Making The Piper Puppet:
 This slideshow shows how I made the Piper puppet form my first designs to the final character on  set. The armature is from animationtoolkit.co.uk and was cover in foam to pad out the body shape. The sculpted clay head was set into a silicone mould and casted up using a fast setting resin. The suite was hand stitched by my self working from a pattern that was kindly given to me. The hands are made form silicone and hair is made out of a fur fabric that was coloured in using a number of different sharpies.

 Making The Kids puppets:
 This slideshow shows how the all 7 kid puppets were made. I had 3 Ball and socket armatures and 4 wire armature that were from animationtoolkit.co.uk. The armatures were covered in foam to give etch kids a different body shape. To save time all the kids had the same head, this was sculpted in clay, set into a silicone mould and casted up 8 times using a fast setting resin. All the kids costumes were made the amazing first year student Cat Hayes, check out her work hear!. The hands are made form silicone. The hair was made by my self and to second year students RobMillard and Giselle Schiniou (click names to see there work) layering up meany hair extensions over a foam core. Once fully dry I would cut it into the desired shape.

 Making The Park Set:
 This slideshow shows the construction of the park set. I started off by covering the Animation table with a big black sheet that I stuck down with PVA glue. Once dry I glued down sawdust in to the shape of the pathway rolling over it till flat. I did the same technique for the chip wood in the main play ground but instead of saw dust I used torn up chunks of cardboard. To make the sky / backdrop i got a 1 meter by 2 meter size strip of blue fabric. I painted on the clouds with poster paint as it seeps into the fabric, I would paint this sky more orange tough out the film to so show that the sun is setting. The chip wood and sawdust were painted with a mix or poster a acrylic paints.

I made all of the play ground equipment my self with scraps pieces of wood, wire and foam board, a part from the seesaw witch I got my good friend Zeke Ares to make, check out his work here! I made the play ground clean first then once all the shots were completed I messed up the play ground. To messy up and to make play ground feel more like a cage for the kids I added a fence all around the park, i also added trees all along the back and sides of the park. this helped me get some every interesting depth and lighting on set. The tree were made out of poster tubes sprayed in glue, rolled in saw dust, painted up and glued to the set.

Thanks for reading guys and as always your comments, questions and feedback are very welcome! Coming soon the making of The Piper part 3.

21 July 2013

The Making of The Piper 1


Well I know it's been a long time sins I last blog any news. As you may have guessed I have been incredibly busy the last 7 mouths. However now university is now all over I plan on getting you all up to date with a sires of new posts.  A good place to start off with is a little film called The Piper.

The Making of The Piper 1

If you follow my work you will know i have been working on this film for the past year. Just before christmas i created a teaser trailer in order for me to work on this idea for the entreaty of my final university year. hopefully you have seen the making of that I posted back in February if not feel free to check it out in my older posts.  
Now that I have finished the film I can now show you all how I made it.  As you can imagine there was a lot of work that went into the film so I have decided to go over the highlights in part 1 and show you a set of making of slide shows in part 2. 
Firstly id like to mention the Armatures and Materials for all of the puppets in The Piper have been sponsored by Animation Toolkit. I have been very fortunate to have been in contact with owner of Animation Toolkit Wes Wood for a number of years, he is an awesome chap and incredibly generous. I was given enough joints, balls, rods and plates from his amazing Ray Harryhausen approved Armacreature sets to make 4 puppets, 1 Piper and 3 of the kids. with the other 3 kids been made out of the wire armature kits. 

I would highly recommend this kit to all you stop motion guys, there is so much potential to what you can create with the kit, may it be human character or your classic creature like the legend Mr Ray Harryhausen would make. To see all the brilliant stock check out AnimationToolkit here! 
 With out the generous help of Animation Toolkit I could not have made The Piper full stop! I'd like to take this time to say a massive thank you to Wes Wood for making this possible and I hope you are as happy with the final film as i am! 

Storyboarding / animatic:
Once I got the script and designs finalised it was time to storyboard the film, I stared off by thumb nailing out the whole story.
With my drawing skills not been the best I decided to get a story board artist Chloe Howley in. I gave Chloe a copy of the script, designs and my thumb nails to and she got back to me with some amazing story boards. 
Sadly Chloe could not board the whole film so I got my Step sister Nadia McLoughlin to takeover.
Once all the boards were competed I started editing them together into the animatic. Creating this animatic was a brilliant way for me to show my production team and mentor what exactly I wanted to do in this film. This also managed to help convince the tutors that I needed to book out and have the set attached to the animation table for 2 mouths solid.
Here is a snippet from the animatic.
Music:
I was very fortunate to get composer Brett McCoy to create original music for film. I gave Bret almost free rain when creating the music for the Pipers playing. however i had the idea to have the boys and girls come out to play theme plying when ever we see a new park set. Brett Worked to the timing and music keys I set up in the animatic with a temp track with music from films and tv.
Bret did an amazing job of the music and id like to say a massive thank you! The Piper would be nothing with out his music.

Cheek out Brett's other work here!

Thanks for reading guys and as always your comments and feedback are very welcome! Coming soon the making of The Piper part 2.