Sneak Peek Stop Motion Extravaganza!

As I've mentioned, I'm currently working on my own film whenever I get a chance. It's a collection of short stories that my dad has told me about his childhood. The first story is in production at the moment with a run time of about one minute. It's primarily going to be hand drawn in Toon Boom 5 (soon to be Toon Boom 6 whoOooooOoOoaaaa), but there's a few small segments that are stop motion.

I've been working on compositing my stop motion footage I shot over at Asterisk Animation courtesy of Richard. I can't thank him enough for his help and generosity. It was ridiculously stressful trying to get everything to work together, but between 2 computers, 2 different stop motion programs, 2 cameras, and some ghetto lighting, it all managed to come together.

The big stop motion scene is underwater. Overall things went pretty well. I was very satisfied with the animation of the three fish characters, however I was a little disappointed with my animation of the plants. The armatures I used were made of steel wire (big mistake!) and the arms of the plants were very difficult to move in the small increments needed to create a subtle swaying underwater look. Right now they move way too fast and way too much. I may just end up taking stills of each plant arm and using the puppet tool in AE. I know that's cheating, but I want this film to look stellar.

Anyway, here's a little sneak peek of one of the characters. I haven't settled on a look for the ocean yet so there's no background at the moment, but you get the idea.



And here's a still that I created as a style frame for the underwater shot. It already looks quite a bit different, but at least you can see the look of the puppets. More to come in the next few weeks!