armiture trouble

whilst shooting my animation i had several problems with my armiture, the main problem being the size. looking back the armiture was too small to animate the subtle details i wanted. i was advised to make the armiture this size and decided it was the best thing to do at the time because my sets where rather large and if the puppets been any bigger the sets would have been too large to move around and caused more difficulties for me. still my armiture was too small, the main problem was that the tension of the wire did not have enough length to spread out. this caused the wire to snap in several places over the armiture. so during the shooting of 5 shots, halfway through the shot the armiture broke, this put me a day behind eeytime as i would have to leave uni an go home to fix my armiture. at first i just patched up some of the breaks with som miliput and hoped it would hold, when this snapped again and i still had important shots to shoot i decided to try a different way to fix it, i used wire and wraped it around the snapped wire and around the other connection be it the hip or shoulder joints, i used superglue to keep it in place, this worked much better than the first way i tried to fix it and the armiture has not broken since i repaired all of the broken joints this way. this process however did take time and also caused my armiture to grow in hight a little, making her slightly too tall for one of my shots inside the tube, so for this shot i tried to position her and the camera in such a way that it was less noticeable that she was too tall for it. if i had the chance to start again i would do it differently, my armitute would be bigger my sets simpler and less of them. i would have not been so overly ambitiouse with my film and kept things more simple. i feel i over complicated a simple story and caused myself more work and dificulties than needed, if i had spent more time planning the whole process would have been much simpler.

blue/green screen

so i had some trouble with blue screen, the day doe lights in the studio are slightly blue tinted so a blue tinted reverb coverd my whole puppet, i tried many different setting on my camera before i decided to switch to green screen, in some of my shots i still have abit of green reverb on my puppet so there have been several shots i have had to manually delete the background in photoshop on every frame because the colour range in after effects would delete parts of my puppet, such as the eyeballs and so none of the lassoing tools and other tools i would normal use for blue/green screening to supress the green reverb would not work very well either. this has been very time consuming for the shots that had a lot of green on them and i have had to find different ways to edit these shots. i found a tool on after effects called 'spill supressor' that works very well at getting rid of this extra green on my puppet without taking any of the other colours or ruining the images, i was very pleased to find this tool as it makes the shots look so much better with minimal effort.

some final sets

set planning

i have been planning my sets, i started with the tube train here are the tube plans, i made several versons and changed things due to size, practicallity of making etc. i found the measuremts for a 1972 service tube online, each carriage is 2.87 metes in hight, 15.98 meters in length and 2.64 meters in width, seating 44people per cariage. with my armiture being 20cm high, divided by 5 makes 4cm= 1 foot. this is going to be the rought scale i will be working with. so h = 2.87m = 9.41 feet = 37 cm. L = 15.98m = 49.21 feet = 196cm. W = 2.64m = 8.61 feet = 30cm. the length is much too long and would be impractical to buildit at that length. so as much as i want to stick to the correct measurements i will be scaling the length down to about 80cm, i is alot but its to make it easyer to construct, paint in detail and transport.







i have now started building the tube, i used these plans to work from and measure but its size has shrunk quite abit due to the practicallity of making the tube, the materials available, thickness of the materials, after moulding and trimming the materials to the right size and shape i lost alot of the original scale however i am hapy with the construction and it would be very difficult to handle if it where any bigger, so i am now reworking my scale, so it is now more like 1.5 cm = 1 foot. due to this new scale my armiture is now much smaller but this does make some things easyer and some things more difficult but i am pleased with this, i have re worked the scale and am now drawing up plans for the rest of the sets and plan to have the basic structures all compleate by next week.

another mock up set

i made this basic mock up set to help me decide on the final styles of my film.
i have decided really want to combne card cut out backgrounds for the 'real world' with a puppet character still, maybe wth ghost like card cut out people walking around the streets and station. i think this will help convey the fact that she is meant to feel compleatly alone and slightly removed from her 'real world', i want this feeling to be a big part of the film and will do some tests with card and the armiture girl soon.

sounds

i have been finding sounds on the iternet to add to my animatic, as im going to have no diolog i will probably want some non-diegetic music for the entire film with added diegetic sound effects. here are some of the websies iv been listning to sounds on.

http://www.a1freesoundeffects.com/

http://www.freesound.org/

http://www.sounddogs.com/

thinking about styles

i have been thinking about styles and i found this video on youtube, i really like the style and i might try and do something similar for my cut out real world, i especially like the stairs and the mix of 2d and 3d is something i would like to experement with.




and i really like the collarge effect of this video