Introduction

For this Unit X I am continuing working on my previous film from authorship. This movie has the intentions of being a demonstration of my work, showing off my set design / animation/ rigging/ homemade motion control rig and post production. which would be for potential clients or work opportunities and once the complete film is finished, to be entered into film festivals. However with the nature of stop motion and a infection I've been dealing with over the past 5 months I wasn't able to finish as much as I wanted, in authorship I tackled the one of the most time consuming and biggest scenes of the film. this being the shot through the city, which builds the world in which my film is set in. For unit x I plan to refine my focus on the other scenes develop the story further.

Refinement of story and focus

Since making the run through the buildings scene my ideas have changed and developed from the process of that project. The water tower which has become the iconography of my city which I why I chose to have it as the flying machine that my character uses rather than a plane. this also means I want to change the opening scene to emphasise this. So in this project I will be focusing on the opening and flying machine scene.

The opening scene now starts with a wide shot of my character's apartment, with the water tower directly in the middle of the shot, which frames the title card between it nicely. my character is staring through the window, the camera moves to a close up, to show the chracter staring straight ahead, this is when it switches to previous units works animation, which i would reverse so the camera starts wide and slowly moves to the wall, which emphasises the wall and the camera's movements become the characters eyes, looking down the street at the wall.

This new scene is going to require me to make a full scale building and water tower, since my character is going to interact with it, I will need to investigate scales for my character design.

Above is the refined and updated flying sequence with the water tower, this comprises of various scenes. for the most part I've designed the scenes to have looping set designs, this means that the

back ground repeats its self behind the subject, creating a infinite continuous loop to allow the space to feel bigger than it actually is. This is also a time saving measure as used in industry so large scale sets aren't needed. This will also be a great challenge for post production, because a lot of these scenes with be layers of composting film together, blending and keying/ masking out green screens, which will help me show a wider skill set for potential work opportunities.

Opening Scene Concept Art

To get a better visual Understanding of the space and surrounding, I've drawn up some sketches of the opening water tower apartment scene, we can see the building standing tall above the others, it focuses our eyes and is drawn to the centre of the screen. The roof tops are also filled with the various bits and bobs that my character will use to construct the flying machine. And as mentioned before, the composition of this shot is also internally done for the title card sequence, which can fit in the negative space.

Another sketch above is to visualise the roof top space, how the character could potentially get up to water tower, through a hatch in this case.

Refinement of the water tower flying machine

The water tower is designed to look like my character has cobbled it together himself from the various things that are around him. In number one I thought a bill board lattice structural support post would be a good fit for the arms for the propellers, it's an item that fits my design and would be believable that my character could find one on a roof top. In number two the corrugated roof for the rudder would easily be found on roof tops. in four for the propellers I though of my character could use his floor boards and lastly the windows in five could be any windows stolen from the various buildings.

The next changed is figuring out how I can construct this in real life, it will be a challenged since this is going to be full scale to my character, since he's going to be interacting and in the scenes for this. it will be a very time consuming part of this project, but this is a good opportunity to show my development process from original concept to building and constructing and then animating a full scale model. for potential work and clients.

Looping Sets

looping sets a iconic stop motion technique and in other animation formats. Primarily used for it's flexibility, allowing for you subject animation to be as long as you want, as it creates a infinite space this also can be seen as a charming stylistic choice but it also means you don't need to build large scale sets. This techincal is something I'm going to experiment in this project as I want to make use of it in my flying sequence.

Wallace and Gromit

A first example of this seamless looping set is the train track scene from Wallace and Gromit, the wrong trousers. This iconic scene uses the wall as the loop mechanism, we can see in the picture above the wall has motion blur, which is curial to make the loop realistic, motion blur is usually achieved by having a lower shutter speed so the image smears across, this is called directional blur. usually the fast the object is moving the bigger the blur. I can easily achieve this in after affect and premier pro, with it's directional blur tools.

Tom O'Meara

I also included this example which follows the same principle of the previous example, however this is a stylistic 'drum barrel rolling' loop which creates a interesting visual perspective, as the in this case the bushes lunge into the scene. this example is from Tom O'meara short called wind of the willows. I want to also recreate this with my buildings and water tower moving through.

We can see my sketches for the drum set, visualising how I would construct and the potential look of the scene, this will be a challenge for my technical abilities. I also sketched out below the side on looping set which will uses parallaxing teachings alongside the loop, which I will go onto later.