Final live action filming (hopefully)

It's been a busy and stressful week, although looking at these pleasant photos you'd never guess....

These are some reference and behind the scenes snippets from my 2 days of filming. I hope to god this is all the  filming i'll need to do, but i'll have to wait and see! Carrying make-shift equipment around a forest all day is tiring, and although I couldn't have hoped for a better team or weather - the scorching sun sometimes made for fast changing light and high contrast in shots where we didn't need it...  Working with friends and Kira the wolf stand-in was fun but working with a disobedient apple was not so much fun!

At the moment i'm putting together a rough cut of the footage we gathered and the animation i have so far, and trying out some masking, 2D tracking and 3D tracking. I hope that this will speed up the final editing process as it will throw up any problems i'm having sooner rather than later and force me to solve them or look for ways around them rather than just letting them be for lack of time.

At the moment the rough cut looks to be nearly 5 minutes long! That's nearly twice the length of my animatic. I know that we were sometimes over-generous with time when shooting scenes i had roughly timed in my animatic, I see no immediate problem in leaving sections that are empty of characters longer than i estimated as it makes almost no difference to my work load. I will have to be careful not to leave some shots over long and empty though for fear of boring the audience- Birdemic style....

Adam and I are planning to edit the colours and light across the chosen shots in the coming days, this will hopefully help to tie very differently lit scenes together and express the chosen moods of my film a little better.

 Kira and Wendy being scale references

 Kira filming some rough and tumble to help me animate my pup caught in a snare (she was having fun, don't worry)

 Turns out: Kira likes apples

Kerri and Kira being references

 ^Photos by Adam Morrow

Kira being a jet pack

^Photo by Wendy Wang

The decision of how to colour my characters is drawing close. I decided to hold off making  the final call on colour palettes until i saw what the final plates would look like, and now that will have to wait until post colour correcting. I have had a little play around though and am keen for feedback.

Numbers 1 and 2 also have a coloured lines version. Numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6  only have a black outline version. As you can see, i already have a fairly solid idea that i'd like the colours on Anna to include some sort of red for her scarf, blue/ green for her skirt and neutral for her top.

I was tempted by coloured lines in theory but looking at the comparison with plain black line art against a photo background from our filming days... I am leaning further towards black lines (also for speed and simplicity sake).

The rest of the gang with their puppy companions in my favourite colours...

I will be attempting to put together a rough colour script in the coming days to help me colour correct my footage. Once that is complete and i have some feedback on my character colour choices i can start working out how to best and quickly colour my animated line art!!

Thank you to my filming team:

Adam Morrow- Camera work

Wendy Wang- assistant and photographer

Qi Feng- assistant

Kerri- reference actor, assistant and dog trainer

Kira- reference actor and stick finder

Thank you to colourlovers.com for colour palette inspiration

Acting Reference for Wolf characters

I filmed a run through of an original play a friend of mine wrote, directed and performed in called "The Last Wolf of Scotland". All the actors wore minimal costumes and makeup and used their body language, mannerisms, voices and expressions to convincingly act as a pack of wolves. 

This is the beginning section of the play:

After reading in Nancy Beiman's book Animated Performance, about animated animals having human characteristics in order to create more empathy with the human audience i was keen to arrange for actors to portray my wolf characters so that i could use their expressions in particular as reference when animating my wolves, hopefully this will produce a more emotionally engaging animated performance.

Although these actors were performing a play unconnected with my film i found it very useful as many themes are similar- and this way i had not directed their performance in anyway- it was not how i had imagined it but how they had created it using their own methods.

I asked the actors a few questions after filming the performance and their answers as well as the results gained from the film data will be put towards the research for my conference paper about the authorship of animated characters.

My next step will be blocking my animation and using the human expressions directly corresponding in this footage to help me create empathy for my animal characters from the audience (Beiman, N. 2010)

Credits:

 Acting: Koren Dumbleton, Eilidh Albert-Recht, Sam Bruton, William Edwards, Joonas Schroderus, Rachael Doran, Nicole Watson, Olivia Quick,  James McMaster

Director/Writer:

Koren Dumbleton

Film:

Adam Morrow

Wolf research & development so far...

After doing a little observational research of wolves from tv and reality i’ve started to refine the original storyboard sketches of my wolf pup.

I will be hoping to strike a balance between human and canine- especially in the eyes, in order to gain the most emotional range possible from my wolf pup. I also want to keep him stylized but clearly recognisable as a wolf pup- i feel like in my original storyboard sketches, he more closely resembled a cat….

The final design is still to be confirmed

What I did on my Christmas Holidays....

Recce number 2! This time: Templeton woods, and then on to Cupar for some wolf drawing :D

Photo and video credit to Adam Morrow

Turnaround & Character Design: ANNA

 Finally finished with Anna's turnaround! the "T" pose is mainly for the purposes of modelling her in maya- however she will be animated in 2D (digitally) so i included a relaxed 3/4 turn.

Anna is a russian peasant girl, she lives in a small village community near a forest where she and her neighbours gather food and hunt. She is 19 years old, recently married and 6-8 months pregnant with her first child.

While drawing my friend Megan, i asked her to wear a long skirt of mine around her rib cage so that i could observe the folds of the material around her bump, i really liked the look and changed Anna's design at the last minute. I was also persuaded to change it after drawing my storyboard and realising that conveying lots of movements would be difficult underneath a shoulder-covering shawl.

 Some costume decisions...

 In the end i dropped the front-tied scarf idea because i thought it made Anna look too old, i found out a head scarf would be essential as Fall of the Wolf is set outside; and after reading parts of "The Empire's New Clothes" i found out that headscarves were a sign of modesty and mainly all country girls and women in 19 Century Russia wore them. They became less common in the cities as other European fashions were absorbed into the culture there.

 I was inspired to design a shawl-type shoulder cover for Anna by one of the characters in "Zelda"- But also liked the idea of an empire-line dress cut like Chicha's (The Emperor's New Groove). Chicha is the only pregnant animated character i can think of. (I do not own the 2 images above)

Researching clothes worn by russian peasants ("The Empire's New Clothes") and sketching some basic outfits for girls...

Some very early google image drawing of pregnant bellies...