So November 4th has come and gone, and no sign of Poof and the Big Blue Sky. I did explain my reasons vaguely in a Facebook post, but I suppose I should explain a little more in detail. I’ll also talk about the lengthy production process of working with Stop Motion.
I’ve already gone into the history of the idea behind Poof, but when realising it I had a few ideas in mind of how I should go about making it. It was going to be narrated and have a musical track in the background so I thought about making it into a storybook format, which you can kind of see with the teaser trailer for the film. Then there’s the element of making it look like a storybook but using different kinds of crafts, such as cotton, wool and plasticine. However, there was one hurdle I had to make.
Animating wool and cotton is much harder than it sounds, this is because of the unstable structure of the material. Moving it piece by piece proved strenuous and although at first, I thought I got the hang of it, I was clearly wrong. When reviewing the footage I noticed the frame-rate I used was too blocky, or in other words, the cloud kept moving to different positions all the time. Restarting a scene meant re-doing all the work I had already done because it wouldn’t have been in sync with the rest of the scene.
Around this time of making the film, I also noticed the lighting was off drastically as I tried to use natural light, as artificial light felt like it dominated too much and made the card and the cotton stand out too much as well. The problem with lighting is consistency and using natural lighting meant at some points it would appear darker than other frames of the scene. This also proved another technical hurdle and I didn’t even notice this until it came to editing.
All in all, what I have learned from this experience are a number of things.
Firstly, I should have worked with a team of people in order to keep continuity from the scenes consistent and to have each one us have a different focus on the production as opposed to just me controlling everything all on my own.
Secondly, I should have done more planning with animating different materials and picking the right one to use, as cotton and wool are clearly not friends to Stop Motion filmmaking.
Lastly, I should have had a second pair of eyes as this would have helped me along the road of making it, as opposed to waiting to edit to discover I had all of these problems.
You live and learn, as they say, and I really do love the Stop Motion format, but it has been a strenuous year trying to make three films and only one of these got released. So I am putting the pause button on Stop Motion for the time being and focusing on other things. If you wish to help out in any upcoming projects then please get in touch.
Thank you for reading today’s blog!
Alex Murray, the Head of Eyesight Productions
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