The Rhyme of The Ancient Merino

The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino...

...In full...


 
The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino from dave jones on Vimeo.

The story is based upon the 50 year history of the ACT (Arapiles Community Theatre) and the recent influx of new arrivals and the changes that has brought about. The puppets were constructed life sized from local farm machinery and filmed in-situ where possible the wheat-fields surrounding the town, the local grain silos and the nearby mount Arapiles.

The film was made in memory of Tim Beohm who, amongst many other things, was the president of the ACT for most of its existence.

With its life sized puppets made of old farm machinery sometimes film haing off the side of the nearby Arapiles or the grain silos, bringing this film is probably still the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.

Hats off too to Ian Van Gemeren too for an fantastic score. And everyone else who helped with the animation, there were a lot of long days and late nights that went into this one.

Enjoy

the Rhyme of the Ancient Merino - trailer

I finally got around to scraping together a Merino trailer for the web. I have been meaning to do this for such a long time.

There is plenty of making of stuff on the blog here if you want to go  digging and hopefully I'll get a chance to upload more over the next few weeks.

But for now...

Enjoy

the Birds (Rhyme of the Ancient Merino)

It's been a long time between updates on The Rhyme of The Ancient Merino, been a bit distracted just lately with the making of the Highly Strung giant puppet.

Anyway, here is a clip "making of" clip of sorts with a few shots on the birds, a mix of raw green-screen shots and some with the green keyed out.


The landing on the fence post shot I actually filmed in reverse....starting with the bird propped on the fence and then flying him back out from there. And somewhere in the middle of the shot (and at about 2 in the morning) one of the wings fell off. Distaster! There's a reason why rusty metal is not the animation material of choice for stop-motion. After a few high-stress minutes of cussing, soul-searching and consideration of the awful possibility that the entire shot might need to be redone, I managed to re-attach the wing with a discrete splint, get the bird back in position, finish off the shot and go to bed. Hot glue saves the day....again. See if you can work out which frame this all happened on.

The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino

Just a quick one.

Here are a few more stills from the film.

I will try and get a bit more "making off" stuff up soon but Im more focussed on just trying to make the film at the moment.

And I'm having (another) exhibition of the puppets props, sets, bits and bobs soon at the Horsham Regional Art Gallery.  I'm not sure about the date for it yet ... but when I find out I'll be sure to post it up here.  

Merino

 Here is a short clip from the film. It's only been roughly composited at the moment... Im hoping to go through and get the whole film done to this level and then come back and do a second pass to clean it all up.  So please try and ignore all the glaring background issues and just be happy that this goat is managing to hoist an actual piano up on his wee tiny thin legs.



If this video embed business isn't working for you ...
Here is the link (http://www.vimeo.com/11223027).

blogging

so....is a badly neglected blog the solution to a badly neglected website?

hopefully I'll find out over the next few months.

Im in the middle of shooting another stop motion film at the moment. All the models are pretty much life sized and made of of scrap metal. Hopefully in the next few days I'll get a few photos of the models up.