Me and Michael continued designing the shadow puppets this week as reference for when we start cutting them out of the black card and animating with them. We had to think about the specific movements each puppet would have and where the joints would connect to allow the most dexterity when animating. We are also unsure at this point whether we’ll be animating on 12fps or 8fps, but this should be clarified when Martha is back from filming on location next week. When designing the puppets, I am mostly using the animatics as reference as well as the style of Lotte Reineger’s intricate shadow puppets, as they convey the fairytale, childlike naivety we are wanting to convey in our animated sequences.
I’m experimenting with short animation tests that, although mostly unrelated in content to Martha’s film, will help me to maintain my understanding of Adobe After Effects, as we will be composing and rendering the sequences for the film in this software. I’m also trying to get used to the medium of shadow puppetry, which is something I haven’t properly tried before. The flatness of the visuals of shadow puppetry will be effective in conveying the naivety of the main girls’ imagination, but it will make conveying depth a bit trickier, so I have been experimenting with layer transparency in after effects compositions to see how this can be worked around. Either layers can be manually made to appear less transparent in the edit to convey depth, or a more organic solution would be to have certain background cutouts further behind the baking paper so as to appear less opaque and further away in the scene, which will be needed for the trees in the wolf section for example. This would be interesting to try before we begin the actual animating, to see if it works and so that we don’t waste any time if it doesn’t.
I enjoyed the camera refresher with Julie on Thursday, as it had been a while since I’d used the Sony Z90 so it was good to familiarise myself with the menu and setup process again, as well as get myself into a mindset where I’m thinking about creative shots in the practical workshop. I think experimenting with the cameras more will be useful when it comes to shooting my own short film this semester.
I didn’t make it to the Masterclass with Clea Tammes as I was having a tooth filling but I read the pdfs and information attached on Learn, which were very informative and I think will come in handy for when I’m scheduling my short film as well as in future projects.
Next week we will continue to cut puppets out in preparation for animating.
