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.
Still plodding along with the Merino film and the Yallourn book.....slowly but surely.
Meanwhile here is a series of stop mo ads I did for the Wimmera Catchment Authority a while ago to promote awareness of the Wimmera River. There hasn't been a heap of rain up here of late and the river that used to be quite a focal point for the population has become more of a series of salty ponds. Last year was the first time in a decade that the river had actually flowed. So the ads were about getting people to remember what it was and not to give up on it just because its going through a bit of a rough patch at the moment. Amazingly enough a lot of river life has managed to hang on somehow in those isolated pockets of salty water... biding its time till the river flows again.
For the third ad (with the tree) I did the stop-motion component all in one horrific 30 hour stint as I had to leave immediately after that for a few days. I literally got up one morning worked all day, all night, finished the shot the next morning walked out, hopped in the car and drove off (was driven rather) for a few days not knowing if the whole thing was a complete disaster that would all need to be re-shot.
This was all done with actual cake (not the easiest of stuff to animate with). I managed to score these after the Centenary Ball for the Natimuk town hall and what you see here absolutely pales in comparison to the actual spread. I mananged to get shots of a couple of tables groaning with the good stuff before the hoardes descended upon them.
My daughters were delighted when I turned up with the box full of left over cakes ... and then appalled when I announced I was going to feed them all to the goats. Lucky for them ...and me, there was still plenty of cake left for everyone after the shot.
On a completely different topic... here is a film I made this back in 2005, working with the kids at Natimuk primary school. The older kids did the interviewed some of the older people in the town and then the prep/grade one kids illustrated the stories. The interviews were actually done in the same old school building that they had done their schooling in some 70 years prior.
All of the drawings were done by the the kids ... I talked to them a bit about walk cycles, lip sync etc and then they interpreted that just as loosely as they did the interview material.
I was surprised and delighted when this film went on to win "Best Animation" at the Melbourne Film Festival that year and "Best Australian Animation" at the Melbourne Animation Festival the next.
I love the drawings of kids at the age where they've just mastered the use of a pencil. They always seem to produce these very raw, very honest, very original designs. It seems that once they get a little bit older and develop a little bit more control over a pencil, the drawings start to become a lot more derivative. You start to see lots of Bart Simpsons, Spongebobs or whatever else happens to be on telly at the time. But right at the start, when they're just getting the hang of it all, they seem to consistently come out with these amazing drawings. I've made about 5 films in this style across the country and it seems to be the case everywhere. 5 year old kids do great stuff.
I have been meaning to upload for years now... And when I get a chance I'll upload some of the other films in this series.
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.
While Im in blogging mode I thought I might as well put up a few more merino piccies...with a few behind the scenes shots too.
Here are a couple of shots from the piano scene. Yes it is a real piano and yes it was bloody heavy. It has been partially gutted (courtesy of Erik Pootjes) but it still weighs a lot and made me nervous whenever I was lying underneath it. Here's a couple of raw shots with all the green screen stuff still in place.
That's Erik on the left and Doug Hockly in the extremely fetching leopard skin pants on the right (this scene was film in Doug & Tash's shed).
You can see a rope fixed to the top of it....this runs up over a pulley and then down to a 44 gallon drum chock full of weights to try act as a counter balance. So it was possible for one person to move it up and down without having to actually lift the weight of the piano.
As you can see...terrible, terrible green screens....but luckily for me I'm working with very monotone models....sometimes it has been easier to key out the brown models rather than the background and then invert the matte.
An animator friend of mine (Al MacInnes) on seeing this commented that he thought the whole point of animation was so people didn't actually have to lift real pianos anymore...
I'm going to attempt upload some actual animated footage soon and will post again when I manage to do this.
I spent the weekend down in Melbourne at the Wheeler Centre
where they were having a conference of sorts on graphic novels. I couldn't tell you specifically what I learned but I heard some interesting ideas, saw some nice work I hadnt seen before, met some great people and above all came away completely inspired and fired up about my "Yallourn:Decommissioned" project.
So here are a few more Decommissioned images to celebrate that.
These are just attempts to work out how stuff might look....so do expect to see any of them exactly like this in the finished work.
At the moment I'm really just trying to get the story structure nailed so I've stopped making pretty pictures for the time being. I suspect my next Decommissioned post will be a bunch of rough sketches and footnotes.
Thank you for a good time Wheeler Centre... and great to see you getting behind graphic-novels/comics/etc as a valid form of literature.
