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?