Pocket Satellite EP Launch and YouTube account.

First I want to start off by saying thank you to Pocket Satellite for showing the animation I made for the EP launch and for all the kind words they gave me. It was a great gig, lots and lots of fun, they were fantastic as always.

Secondly I have created a channel on YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/adamsshortfilm, where you can view the animation that was showed on Monday night. Hopefully you will all enjoy it and it will keep you interested in the making of the final product.

I rushed the making of this animation so I apologise for the scrappiness of it. I may touch it up when I have time and put a higher definition version up on YouTube at a later date.

Anyway, enjoy.

Now you see it...Now you don't...

Have been rubbish at updating again recently. I have filmed 5 more seconds of usable footage since I last updated as well as a number of test shots trying to get movements, lighting and effects sorted.

The footage I have been working on is of the rocket that the Girl will be using to get around. I had to use lots of unsightly wire attached to my Mums cross stitch holding frame to lower the clay rocket down onto the set. I have then had to remove the wires from each individual frame in a photo editing software afterwards. This probably would have been quicker if I had more experience with photo editing, yet another learning process I have had to go through.

Anyway I am pretty pleased with the finished article and am now ready to move on to animate a close up of the rocket landing with dust being kicked up, which is proving quite difficult to make look good.

In the mean time I am editing and building on the hand drawn part of the video to make a little teaser that will hopefully be shown on Monday at the EP launch of Toy Train at West Street Live.

Lights...Camera...Action!

Today, with the help of my Dad, I have shot the first scene. I feel so happy, it looks quite good.  I know I said I would start filming over a week ago but things got in the way, as they tend to do. Damn those things!

Anyway, filming has at long last begun. A whole 2 seconds and 10 frames filmed! It is painstakingly slow and my back is only up to leaning over a puppet for a relatively short period of time. No worries though, I have some time (and back) saving tricks up my sleeve which should help.

As you can see I have had to make use of wire aids to hold her up whilst shooting but with a little photoshopping you will never know they are there.

In other news, the hand drawn part is finished, I promise, until I decide to tweek it again that is. Also if you happen to be visiting Pocket Satellite on their myspace page you can now see a little banner I have put together for them at the very top of the page.

More updates as we go so come back soon.

Progress!!!!

Someone smart somewhere once said “Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity.” which is exactly what I seem to have done with this project. 

Anyway progress has finally been made! After much cursing and tearing my hair out (metaphorically of course, I am not going bald!) I have made headway with the 3D animation, albeit more test shots, and I have almost finished the 2D animation. Just a few tweeks and by tomorrow it shall be done and dusted, YAY!!


I think I may take Sunday off and then begin the 3D animation with a renewed fire inside! Very excited that I can finally see which way it is all moving, it is on the up.


Check back soon for more enthralling updates!

Test Shots...At Last!!!!!

At last I have finally got everything working well enough to shoot some tests for lighting and to get an idea of speed for the puppets movements. Also everything is now at a quality I am happy with, it has taken long enough. Still trudging on with the hand drawn part too. I am very happy it is finally moving and just thought I would post some frames to prove that there is at last some progress in the stop motion end of the film! Feeling a bit rough after having my flu jab yesterday so will probably be nothing of note happening today but check back soon as there may be a little momentum building....

Drawing, Drawing....and More Drawing.

Its been a couple of weeks since my last update. The filming ground to a halt yet again as the camera I was going to use wasn't really up to the job, too much noise in low light, not a good enough sensor. So, I have been waiting for my Dad to get back so I could use his camera (much better). More issues with software has also caused delays with filming but it is all fixed now.

In the meantime I have been getting on with the hand drawn part of the film. I have 30 seconds to draw but it has taken me well over 50 hours so far, partly because I am never happy with what I draw and always seem to find ways of improving it. Anyway, after "refining" the first 15 or so seconds of the animation I am halfway there. I think I now have a style and look I am happy with, so thought I would post a few frames on here to see the look I am going for, bearing in mind the hand drawn part is to be a sort of flash back/dream sequence.

Hope you enjoy and I shall update again once I have begun filming.

An Overdue Update

I know it has been a week since my last update but progress has been slow. Many household chores, a bad back and my obsessive nature have made building the puppet of the girl take longer than expected.

Over the week I finished giving her legs and feet and began the skirt. This time around I decided to give her a dark grey skirt as a bit of contrast to make the puppet a bit more interesting to look at on screen as I felt the first puppet I made looked a bit bland with all the same shade of grey. I also thought that I should try and put a few pleats or waves in her skirt to make it look more like a skirt and again to make it a little more interesting.

I then bulked out her upper body and tried to make her top appear as though it was over the skirt. I also gave her top dark grey sleeves and a bit of a collar type thing. I had to redo the arms and legs again a little bit as I had been clumsy whilst making the clothes and damaged the limbs and got smudges on them.

Finally it came to the helmet, which I thought I was going to use the original one I had made. Yet again my clumsiness meant I have had to make her a new one. So as of tomorrow I should finish the helmet and maybe even start shooting, wouldn't that be exciting...

The Day I Made the Blog

Today I gave the puppet arms of white clay and partly built a leg. The rest of my day has been taken up making this blog and writing all the previous enteries, I shall finish the puppet tomorrow as I am off to watch Fringe now.

27th August 2009

After having a day off and much fun catching up with friends it was time to get back to working on my puppet. Once more, armed with my glue gun, I decided to use the dense foam to bulk out the torso and keep the weight down.

Then I mixed a light shade of grey modelling clay and covered the torso with it.

25th August 2009

Puppet mkII. This time I decided to try my hand at making a full armature. I had avoided this after the poor effort at building the frame for the backdrop. So I got my pieces of wire and my glue gun and began to bring to life the main character of the story, not unlike Dr Frankenstein. This took me most of the day but the result was pretty good, not aesthetically but functionally.

23rd-24th August 2009

Time to begin making the puppets. I decided instead of trying to make the puppet entirely out of modelling clay I would build a torso out of dense foam and then limbs separately using pieces of wire twisted together and a glue gun to strength the parts I didn't want to bend. The plan went well, I covered the torso in clay and it was still nice and light. I then covered the limbs in clay too ready to be attached to the torso.

I then made the head, using a cotton ball I again covered it with clay. It took a few redesigns but I got there in the end. I put it all together and was fairly happy with the outcome. The only problem was that as I moved the limbs it made the holes in the foam torso looser and looser. So I packed it with clay but to make it strong enough was to make it too strong to move the limbs easily. It was time to once again go back to the drawing board...

21st-22nd August 2009

More changes were made, to the design of the set and to the location. Untill now the set had been built on my dining room table, which had also been moved to make better use of the space. This, as my Dad pointed out, meant that for the next couple of months whilst making the film I would have nowhere to eat my dinner. To solve this problem the set was then moved into my study and placed out one of my outdoor tables. Much to Carls dismay we no longer had room for the frame he had made for the backdrop, we had a wall instead.

Now I could eat dinner once more, in a civilised fashion, I could continue to think about how to make the set look better. Still the grid lines were more obvious than I would have liked. Then my Dad had the bright idea of painting more detail onto the landscape to obscure these lines. While I had the paints out again I decided I may as well add some detail onto the mountainous backdrop I had cut out of the foam. Thankfully I am now happy with the look of the set and it is time to start making the main characters!

19th -20th August 2009

After waiting a couple of days for more materials to arrive in the post I had been given chance to think about what we had done so far. What I had decided is that the foam base wasn't convincing enough as the moon, it was too bland as well as being too obviously foam. On top of that the joins between pieces of foam were rather unsightly.

To remedy this problem my Dad and I filled in the joins with modelling clay. This looked better but the grid lines were still obvious, so we used modelling clay to make the whole landscape uneven and more "rocky". To blend all the materials together and make the landscape complete I painted it with grey acrylic paint. To give the impression of distance I then cut a mountainous backdrop out of foam to place against the night sky backdrop, which in itself caused me some problems.

I had decided I wanted LEDs protruding through the backdrop to give the impression of stars. This caused a problem. The foam I was going to make my night sky out of looked rubbish with loads of LEDs behind causing a lot of ripples and general uneven-ness. So a new plan had to be put into action. Luckily my Dad had found my sisters art supplies she had left behind. I naturally aquired the aforementioned supplies.

I took a couple of canvases and painted them with black acrylic paint and cut holes into them to poke the LEDS through. All was going to plan, or so I thought. After taking a few test shots with my K20D it turned out the LEDS were too bright and caused a lot of lighting issues. So in the end we decided we just needed to get a diffused light source behind the canvases to give the impression of stars in the night sky.

August 15th-16th Production begins

On the weekend of the 15th August 2009 Maya and Tom came over to put the finishing touches on the EP and to help me start production of the film, well the 3D animation part of the film anyway. I had already drawn 12secs of animation that will feature within the film.

While Tom and Carl were working on mixing the EP Maya and myself went out to B&Q to buy the materials to build the set. We had great plans to build a frame to attach the backdrop to. "How hard can it be?" we thought, a few pieces of wood nailed together, not a problem. It didn't take long for us to appreciate the skils of a carpenter and a joiner and for us to realise that we weren't blessed with them. Luckily Carl knows what he is doing when it comes to building wooden frames and saved the day.

After a trip to Hobby Craft we went about building a lunar landscape from foam and modelling clay. Once the craters had been moulded we then started on the props, spaceships, planets, flowers, worms, you know, the usual.

At last the production had begun, how little did I know how much work would be involved and how much I had to learn...

How it started

It all started when my friends band, Pocket Satellite, began writing songs for their new EP "Toy Train". Maya, Tom and Carl spoke to me about how they wanted to make a simple video for one of their songs. I liked the idea and fancied getting involved myself. As it turns out I just happen to have some spare time on my hands so I offered to help Maya with the video and thankfully she agreed.


As I listened to the song over and over I began to get a few ideas for the video. Maya had drawn a character she wanted to use as the art work for the EP and we thought it would be a nice tie in if we could base the film on that character. So for the next month or so I started sketching and playing around with some ideas that became more and more extravagant. The band have been really enthusiastic about all my ideas and have let me take control of the film, whether this is a good idea or not we shall see.

So this is the continuing blog of how, with the help of a few friends and family, I am turning the little love story I have written into a short animated film.