Sounding Suspicious

Definitely finished now.  Definitely.  Only a final tweak or two to the edit and some special effects - I know, I said last time that I would build big, complete sets and do everything in camera so that post production was a simple cut and splice job like it was in the old days - but still, there are some rig removal jobs to do and the water effects to key in.

Oh, I've already shot them.  That was a fun day at work, crouching in front of a blue screen in the bath, splashing water at my expensive new camera and laptop.  What a lark we had!

Then there's the sound.  No dialogue, innit. (Innit?)  In a breathtaking departure, I have included almost no dialogue in this movie.  You should know that my last two pictures were very speech heavy.  POPPYLANDS had over eighty individual shots with lip-sync and FIREBIRD was mostly just people standing around chatting.

This Boy has FOUR spoken lines.

But it means that the final cut is almost completely a silent movie.  I have no digetic sound (the sound recorded on set or location, teacups on saucers, breathing, clothes rustling, footsteps etc) so it all has to be painstakingly crafted by hand, one element at a time.  And because there is essentially nothing for the audience to listen to, the quality and quantity has to be a little higher than normal.  You can get away with murmur if the characters are talking over it, but if there's a problem with the sound and picture not being quite right, people will notice.

A momentary oversight caused by my over enthusiasm earlier in the week amused me.  Kelvin rests against a wooden gate at one point and the hinges squeek.  I'm very proud of the hinge squeek, by the way.  It's played by a Screwfix trigger clamp, yet another reason to just have as many of them to hand as you possibly can!

But the trouble is, I forgot myself while recording and proceeded to create a lovely load of interactions with a metal farm gate like so many that I knew in my youth, and it wasn't until I stepped back from the desk and played all the sounds together with the film that I realised while the noises were perfectly solid and acurately synced, the gate on screen is very obviously made of wood!  It just sounds wierd. 

Next Time Write a Script, Boy.

Yer, I haven't actually finished shooting. I've had to go back to the stage to get some more material.  I've learned an important thing in the course of this project:  A screenplay is not a dispensable tool on an
animation set. 

Working through the rushes for what seems to have been a lifetime, I have now got a relatively concise five minute film to show  - well, not to show, obviously, not yet, but you get my meaning. 


The trouble is I haven't the faintest idea how to describe it.  It is wholly improvised, each section devised and shot in sequence and there is a narrative thread that ties it all together. But it couldn't be less traditional! The current reshoots, incidentally, are the result of some bad decisions long ago in the shooting that have messed up the continuity.  Turns out there's only so much that you can fix in post production, even in this day and age. 

At the risk of sounding catastrophically solipsistic, it's been a great learning process for me to make this film.  I've used it to fine tune techniques and explore technologies and I can't deny the result is very pretty.  In many ways it is a character study, and an experiment into the versatility and the limits of the stop motion form. There is little to no dialogue - Hey! Something managed to get me to shut up! Well done Something!

The main character actually interacts very little with anyone else so it represents a purely internal dialogue which is played out in a variety of subtle expressions.  He goes through a range of emotional states universal to anyone who has ever been a teenager and expresses through his reactions, the frustrations that that period of  life and it's inherent lack of control is heir to.

I suppose that's where this film has taken me too.

I have never felt in control of it, even now, I'm looking at the rough cut unsure if it's the film I planned to make, desperately doubtful of what an audience is likely to make of it.

Still I must purge on.  I mean, take Cats:  that's not about anything and that seems to work.

Me in Black

So, I've finished shooting...

I know, comes out of the blue, doesn't it?  I was going to say a lot more about the set construction but, rather abruptly, I found it was all finished and the evenings were dark enough to start shooting. So I did, then I kind of got carried away and fourteen months later, here we are.

A secret source in the Greensmanry trade supplied me with a terminal quantity of artificial leaves and flowers and a few intimate hours with a hot glue gun left the stage encircled by rich foliage which, while a little out of scale, is very satisfying on the eye.  Especially while nature has been going the other way into a long, dark winter.

Ta Dah!

Lessons this time include: Plastacine dries out!  I deliberately preserved Kelvin in the state I had last used him so that the make up effect of mud splattered on his face would work in continuity as he returns to the house covered in mud (this is already shot)  My aim was to shoot the last scenes first so he gets muddy then we go back and take the shots where he's still clean - he has a whole set of clean clothes for this, don't worry, there's no dry cleaning to do.

You'd have the shirt off my back!

However, trying to make his face move is a bit more of a trial than I expected.  Two years on, there is no moisture left in his skin, it has more or less set solid and his performance in the first couple of takes is a little wooden.

Not to worry, though.  It is probably about time that I did a bit of care work on the armature anyway.  Some of the foam padding has worked its way around bits it shouldn't and his joints are all loose.

HEAVE!

I worked with wire armatures on Firebird and although I did it for reasons of economy - I said before it was not meant to be a big deal, whoops! - I have to say I found the pliability and hold of the twisted wire technique really satisfying to work with. 

I believe I'll go that way in future, after all, they're cheap to make, pretty light weight and yet very solid and although some subtlety is lost in the precision of movement, it only takes a little more care to achieve the same results.  The main thing is that they hold so well, you can leave them for days without the risk of the armature settling under it's own weight.

Also rigging for flying, jumping, walking etc.  The puppets are so light, they can be rigged off a pipe cleaner!



Such things I wish I could say about Kelvin.  It's to do with the workmanship on the puppet itself - I freely admit, some parts are below standard and in his defense I had no experience of making ball and socket armatures when I started on his skeleton - it is a constant source of amazement that something so small could be so heavy!  I've had to rig him for jumps and falls and I'm astonished how tight the bolts need to be to keep him upright.  Not only that, but on several occasions I have had to bring in a little assistant (Lego, believe it or not. Who Knew?) to hold him in place while I get some sleep. 

Once upon a time before video assist systems, surface gauges were used in between each frame to hold the puppet and point to where it had been in the last frame so that the next move could be visualised in three dimensions on the set.  Must have been a nightmare! lol.