Wrapping up Pre-Production

Since finishing semester 2 i've been in a hurry to catch up as much as i can with pre- production for Once bitten, so that i can start production as soon as possible. 

I had a fairly good idea of what my pup should look like thanks to the work i did with Bimpe at the beginning of semester 2:

 But i still had a mother wolf character to lock down- with the wolf pup's design solid i had something to work up from, i also had my main inspiration from secret of the kells as well as Bimpe's concepts for adult wolves.

Not wanting to dally much longer in the designing stages i came up with a design i was happy with using what i already had:

I also made a turnaround for my pup:

 I produced character sheets to help me understand the characters in different moods and poses and to give me practise drawing them:

The scale of the wolves is stylized: 

I found reference of a real wolf cub with a human for scale as i wasn't sure how big to make the cub in comparison to Anna (turns out wolf pups are pretty big!). I knew i could make him slightly bigger than realistically accurate but needed him to still be cute and un-intimidating. I also want the scale of the mother when the audience and Anna see her in full for the first time, to be a surprise.

I was also inspired to make the mother wolf large and imposing, by the scale of the Dire wolves in Game of Thrones:

However compared to my original storyboard the wolves are scaled DOWN!

While making up my model sheets i played around with some possible colour combinations for my wolves. However i think it might be early to make a final decision here. I am tempted to leave it until i have final footage to comp the characters in to. 

 

Title Change!

Heads up! The working title of my film has changed from "Fall of the Wolf" to "Once Bitten". I felt that the previous title had been out-run by the film's development- now the film involves neither a fall of a wolf (owing to my decision to leave the ending as a cliff-hanger) or a seasonal fall (owing to the time for final filming falling in spring).

"Once Bitten" refers to the phrase "Once bitten, twice shy" obviously, and i think the literal meaning ties in with the symbol of the apple in my film, whereas the metaphorical meaning ties in with the film's narrative arc of innocence lost and the birth of a war between the wolves and the humans.

Research: Existing Animation- Watership Down

Deceptively charming and innocent: Watership Down is pretty brutal,  and attracted my attention in my search for good reference for one of the hardest scenes i will have to animate... my pup becoming trapped by it's paw in a rabbit snare.

I made a sketch of this scene to help me understand the poses and line of action better, and breakdown the things about it that make it disturbing and nail biting...

The pulling away from the snare seems counter- productive but immediately indicates panic and also the animal instinct to flee from danger. This is something i can use for my animation, however, i noticed Bigwig's design changed dramatically while he was trapped- it helped emphasize the danger he was in because he suddenly appeared bloated and withered, unlike his normal strong, sturdy and lean style. I don't think i like the idea of applying this idea too heavily to my own animation, i think the scene will be stressful enough for the audience, and i plan to convey the fear and severity in the situation through the pup's expressions and dramatically changed body language- compared to the beginning of the film.

I plan to also use my reference footage of actors portraying wolves to help convey the wolf's fear and panic, there is a scene in the play where a wolf becomes trapped by it's paw in a hunter's trap:

 "The Last Wolf of Scotland" also has representations of protection, defiance, and fear- similar to Watership Down which will be useful when animating both human and wolf characters in my film. Hopefully all of these visual aids will help me create identifiable character performance.

Defiance and protection...

WD:

LWS:

 FOTW:

 Fear...

WD:

LWS:

FOTW:

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 pup development

 Bimpe's concept art, we met and looked at this together and made notes to go ahead with, i decided i'd like to mix mine and her styles for the pup from this point forward, and asked her to carry on concentrating on the mother wolf character.

The white wolf in "secret of the kells" has a very appealing sleek shape and is very geometrically put together- i wanted this to be a big influence on my designs

Chris Sanders' animals are so cute, i took inspiration from this- also, my hope is that basing both human and animal characters on the same artist's style will link them visually.

I love Meg Park's wolves and dogs- again very geometrically built

 My rough photoshop sketches, trying to merge the styles highlighted above with Bimpe's work

 

Wolves are easier to draw from the side.... working out some poses for the film and to use in my model sheet- and trying different shapes.

 

Trying different shapes of eyes- i felt like some of these made him look too feline/ female/ angry/ happy all the time

 working out how to make him look less like a cat front-on: lengthening his nose. It was suggested that he looked a bit squirrelly in the far left one, but i love it XD

i'm happy with the look of him here- which was me sketching out a pose for the final scene of my animatic. He has fat front legs and paws now, with a much fitter looking body compared to my animatic pup. He has wide set, huge, round eyes (this part i have kept from my original sketches) a long snout and a geometric build made up of diamonds and triangles.

New(er) animatic!

Here we go again! Another animatic, now with slightly more changed timing, a timecode and a new ending! "ooooo"

I was spurred to make some of these changes when i peer reviewed my last animatic with people who hadn't seen any of the development for it so far. This was very useful: Kaitlin who is an experienced writer and storyteller gave me some advise about my ending- that i needed to show the emotions the pup was feeling- otherwise the ending seemed detached. So in this new version we see the pup's face in the final shot, and we also see the apple (both these things tie down the story nicely as the whole thing starts with them). Also in the new version i've added some ambient scary music towards the end, to fill the silence and indicate a tone of foreboding- i'm just trying it out- originally the plan was not to bother with a score.

New animatic

I finally made that better timed animatic with sound that i've been chatting about for ages -_- All the sound is free or just me...It's all meant to help tell the story, and help me understand the timing really!