The dark and eerie forest..

I've been looking for inspiration for the creepy forest scene in our paper boat animation, or at least something that resembles what I want to achieve, and this video pretty much sums it up. It's a clip from The Adventures of Prince Achmed which is actually the oldest surviving animated feature film. It was made in 1926 and uses Lotte Reiniger's own invented technique of silhouette puppets made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead. The story was taken from the collection of 1001 Arabian Nights.

Reflection and Looking Ahead

Considering my tutor has been off ill most of the week I've actually had a fairly productive session. Since the majority of my group for the Zeus animation had been awol, Len and I have just been beavering away on our live brief and we have a pretty decent idea of where we're going with it in terms of story and technique.

I think for next week we just need to sort out some concept work, most of which is already in the pipeline, and work on some kind of simple storyboard just to set some of our ideas in stone. I would also like to get out and track down some good locations for the live footage portions of the animation, just so we're ready to roll when we have the equipment.

There's still loads of work to be done for our Zeus animation, we desperately need to have a meeting and organize some kind of plan for who will be doing what. There's story boarding to be done, model making, set building and a final draft of the script needs to be written up. With any luck we will be able accomplish the majority of that next week, although it looks like my paper boat brief will just have to take a back seat for a few days.

Frogger

On a side not, in a frantic bid to become more organized Len and I built this rather fetching 'Frog Drop Box' yesterday to pop all our hand outs, briefs,module guides etc in. To be frank, I think Dave must be close to throttling us the amount of times we've had to go begging for re-prints of pretty vital information.

Life Brief

Well, the live brief is now officially well underway. Len and I have teamed up to bring 'The Story Of The Little Paper Boat' into the world, the plan is to produce a multi media animation following the adventure of an origami boat as it drifts from a little stream out into the great unknown. I think my illustrious partner puts it best when he say "There will be creepy crawlys, steam boats, sea monsters and strange beastys galore".

This map started out as a quick doodle but I ended up spending an entire afternoon working on it, it was meant to be a visualization of all the ideas we had been playing with as to where the little boat would actually travel to but as you can see it doubled up as a sort of basic time plan and simple story board guide as well. We started jotting down the thoughts we had for different scenes and animation techniques and it finished up looking pretty snazzy!

shoe country

We spent most of this morning making a quick pixelation video, needless to say, fun times were had by all.

McBess

I've been following this French, London based illustrator and animators work for ages now, but he's just released a clip from his bands music video (which he also animated) and I wanted to share it with you all!

He's also just released this rather beautiful print from his online store, A2, limited to 50 prints and only £60!! So if anyone is feeling generous this Christmas it can be found here...

http://www.mcbess.com/buy.html

peace out

I figured since I had already posted on the progress on my stop motion puppet I should really come back and show just who it is I'm actually making! Introducing.. Zeus! These are the character elevations for my college group project staring the once King of the Gods, The model has run into a few hiccups lately though and I'm having to scrap his y-fronts in favour of a pair of two-stripe tracky bottoms. The original plan was to have him wandering round his apartment in all his Godly glory, and only donning an old dressing gown when he did rarely leave the house. But his legs were just too thick and solid to bend, so he wouldn't of been able to walk, I've had to demote him to covering up a little.

I'll post some new pictures of the model first chance I get!