Holding my nerve

Editorial are bit apprehensive about running this post, being as it is principally about watching paint dry.  But I've argued that people who aren't into the long slow processes of creation won't be reading, will they?  So, fellow enthusiast; read on and delight at my forensic examination of wetwork. Look, before you say it; I know that term can mean a lot of different things but I suppose I'm secretly hoping that less innocent Google searches will grade this blog higher as a consequence of using it.

All Purpose Filler is very versatile stuff - it says in the name, doesn't it? I've been using it to create all sorts of surface textures around my forest.  I found a kilo and a half box of the stuff hidden in the attic a few months ago and although it was a bit clotted, I figured it was worth trying it out.  My standard practice is to mix up an acrylic base colour into the wet plaster.  A colour that more or less suits the purpose.  For example, brown for soil, grey for rocks and roads etc.  It will never be any use as a surface colour because the stuff dries much much paler than the original mix and without getting into scientific part for part calculations, the final colour is a bit hit and miss.

So why do it?  Because the shooting process is extraordinarily violent as far as the set is concerned:  equipment cracks and bashes and scrapes it's way around the set and then drills gouge holes for fixing puppets down.  Then glue and tack rips up paintwork where props have been held in place and sharp things get left lying about all over the place that scrape and knock and drag....  If the beauty of the rendering were only skin deep, there would be all sorts of blinding white scuff marks all over the set by the end of the first day!  By colouring the base plaster, any chips expose a fragment of suitable colour instead and the damage is, for most practical purposes, invisible.  Clever huh?  I wish I'd thought of it myself but I must credit Christopher Payne in his awesome book "The Encyclopedia of Modelmaking Techniques"  Required reading as far as I'm concerned.

So, about four litres of liquid filler have been poured over the set in the last few weeks - yes, really that much, you'd be surprised how big a surface is being covered here - This takes a while to dry, as you can imagine.  And being the early onset of cold times (here we go) it's generating a lot of condensation for the windows.  I've had to bring in a de-humidifier to soak up the water but that's off the point.  The old box of filler turned out to have a little less integrity than fresh plaster would have had - I've no idea how long it was sitting idle.  When  I built up the first load of trees, I was a little troubled by the fact that 24 hours later they were still a bit powdery.  The old filler had not set properly!  Aaaargh!  In actual fact, I had nothing to worry about, I learned that there is an important difference between "set" and "cured." Holding out for an extra day or two and the filler hardens perfectly well on it's own.

So the next move is to wash the whole set with diluted PVA glue.  What for?  This is from my experience early in my career, building life-scale sets. The intensely porous surface of the rendering will soak up more paint that you can possibly imagine making it very difficult to get a consistent finish.  The traditional way is to boil up horses hooves to make a gelatine size that you slap on with a big smelly brush. That's not done any more. Thank goodness for science.

At this point in the process it's hard to believe that I've made any progress at all.  Nothing seems to move on  from day to day.  The trouble is, it's a waiting game.  A couple of hours work with runny plaster or PVA wash, or wood glue and I have to hang about another day for the work to dry in order to do the next thing.  It's why I have time to write this.  Looking through pictures - I've taken hundreds, you know - I can begin to see that actually there is some development taking place.  It's a bit like watching a child grow.  Nothing seems to change for years and suddenly he's fourteen. Who saw that coming?

Fabricating the Evidence

So, the fabrication of the Great This Boy Forest is underway.  And it's a big project, I'll be at it a while longer.

Kelvin visits the set in it's raw cedarwood state

The act, as I mentioned before has a couple of practical needs.  There's a stream (to which I've added a waterfall and to be honest, I've no idea how that's going to happen yet.) The whole stage needs to be big enough that the shots won't need compositing later - that's important - and, to offer variety and comic prat-fall potential; lots of levels.

We never talked about set building on the Firebird blog, it was all done before I thought to write anything down, so let me tell you a little about the techniques I've been using to plant this forest.

I used hardboard as a basic surface.  Experience has taught me it's a good soft material and the thickness is right and it's inexpensive too.  I have to admit, I started out thinking like a stage carpenter and created lots of flat topped rostra who's faces I was going to contour to look like natural landscape.  That was never going to look like anything more than pantomime scenery.  I've spent a bit of time hanging around forests and moors in recent months.  Very seldom do you find a flat floor that you can conveniently stand a puppet on. With a bit of  bending and pushing I forced the lower floor into a more contoured shape all over.  The added value is that it now needs less support from underneath than the version I had originally designed which leaves the under-croft free of supporting members that get in the way of tie-down bolts. The tension in a curved surface creates it's own strength.  Try it with a letterbox - one of those evil ones with stiff brushes and the internal flap and extra strong spring.  A thin, flat envelope will fold and crush turn to pulp but arc the envelope between your thumb and fingers and it forces it's own way through.  How do you think the postman does it?

I had to eat loads of Wheetabix for this

The same principle is what I've used on the drops between levels, only in a different way.  The latticework here is made of cereal boxes cut into strips.  You'd be surprised how strong it actually is.  The strips are woven together and a spot of hot glue tacks each contact point.  Because each thread is anchored to a solid object, there is very little space for them to move.  When they are covered in pasted newsprint they become a very thin but solid surface.  Adding a plaster based rendering - I'll mix it with wood shavings to make a gritty loam floor - and the whole thing will be almost completely hard.  It can be drilled and bolted and everything!

On the other side of the stage and further into the story, a rocky strata is required for the river bed.

The limitation of the cardboard lattice is that it works best for smooth contoured shapes and rolling hummocks. I have used it in the past for cliff faces but on this scale, a much better material is good old fashioned expanded polystyrene.  It's cheap - free in fact: never pay money for the stuff,  you'd be surprised what you'll find in other peoples bins!

Breaking this into little chunks makes a delightful mess that I'll be clearing up for months but it lets me work really fast creating, in an evening, all the basic formations of shelves and gullies that would take nature several centuries.  A hot glue gun is my best friend in this as in most things because polystyrene almost never allows wet glues to dry, it's too good an insulator!  Even hot glue stays soft for ages.

The Gillespie Stage is basically Victorian technology.  A wooden structure throughout means I'm happy to drill and screw into the main supporting members as I need to. Originally it was built to have a solid chipboard floor about half and inch thick but for this show, I've ditched that and moved some of the joists round to take the floor up and down as necessary.  Overhead, are three cantilevered lighting bars.  They are raised off the floor by two main upright rails that you can see in the back of all the pictures. Because my lights are very (ha ha) light, this is no issue but it is unsound to try and rig a camera off the grid at the moment because there's no support at the front of the stage.  In come the trees, so.  The same latticework structure as the soft contours, they are built around several supporting struts.  I don't know if I want to put the camera up there yet but now if I do, I can.

On "The Extraordinary Revolution of the Firebird," I used a tripod only once in the whole production because I discovered that it was safer to clamp every conceivable thing directly to the stage unit. That way, if it gets a dunt halfway through a shot, nothing moves...   well everything moves, but all together...  like a planet... so the camera never sees it which is the same thing.  Makes sense?

That's where I've got to.  More to follow.  Much MUCH more.

And Starting Over

When I left off making this picture nearly eighteen months ago, I had completed the first act - so to speak - and had found a reasonable hiatus in the narrative.

This film, I should mention; is entirely improvised.  There is no script, no base plot, and a distinct absence of planning.  Don't worry, that's deliberate.  I'm hoping I discover a narrative thread that can tie all the little character vignettes together, but that can only happen once those have been devised.

A messy room is a sign of creativity!

I know. It sounds absurd, given the nature of animation and the demand for excessive preparation and planning to create each finicky moment, but I really have been simply working out each scene as I go along.  Defining roughly where I want the story to go and then letting the puppets find their own way through it.  It might make something of a continuity issue later.

To be honest, I've not invested much in this film to date so if I lose my shirt it's not a big deal.  Yes, the sets are rich and it is prop heavy.  It opens in an untidy bedroom and I have had to literally make the mess - I mean I have to fabricate each little item that has been recklessly tossed all over the floor....

But the truth is that nearly everything seen so far, the set, the furniture, the bric-a-brac etc. was prepared at great expense of time and effort several years ago for a small collection of scenes in the middle of the Poppylands movie.  I've barely modified them from that.  Even one of the puppets was fabricated as a stand-in/double for a principal character in that picture so the only real outlay is the ball and socket armature inside Kelvin which was intended to be a prototype anyway.

Now, however, a forest has to be constructed. A dark and terrible forest with a practical stream, abandoned sheep-farmer's cottage and of course a quicksand pit.

Furthermore, on The Extraordinary Revolution of the Firebird, I built a set that required compositing with matte paintings which really rather limited my choices when it came to photography and left me with a lot more post production than I really wanted to do.  So I would like the forest to be self contained as much as possible - no blue screens littering my visual space.  No sir.

I think that's going to be quite hard.  Any ideas?

Changing my story

When I was about thirteen years old I had a great admiration for physical comics like Gerry Lewis and Norman Wisdom.  I just wanted to be them. I still had to graduate from watching cartoons, and, one day when I grow up; maybe I will.

Do you remember in "Who framed Roger Rabbit" when the opening cartoon grinds to a halt and the director storms onto the set to yell at the co-star.  I love that moment.  I would still like to believe that animations were made that way. Sadly the last film I saw before discovering the terribly boring truth was the Jungle Book in 1979.  Still, this boy can dream, can't he?

An old memory Inspired by a Swedish children's book ignited Kelvin in my mind.  So the project began production some fourteen months ago.  It's a number of anecdotes: silly things that young people do - or want to do.  It's an opportunity to turn myself into that physical comic character that I've always wanted to be.  Everything in the film genuinely happened, and rather embarrassingly, it really happened to me.  Just not all in the same order or for the same reasons. There are people out there who remember the stories and I expect to come under fire for rewriting the classics. That's just how movies are made...