Me and Michael continued to cut puppets out this week, mostly on Tuesday 13th and Thursday 15th as these were days we were both entirely free. We managed to design and cut out quite a few of the sheep, and as Martha was on set she sent us over the voice-over narrations from the two main girls, which would come in handy later when timing the animation in after effects.
We were also able to meet Martha in the cinema space while her and Ella were editing and see some of the footage from the shoot, which was exciting and also helpful in terms of seeing which shots would come before and after the animated sequences. We discussed how we would transition in and out of the sequences, as maybe cutting straight into the animation would be too sudden and break up the narrative, as well as how cutting out of it back to live action would be in the same way. We discussed maybe having certain elements of the animation coming into the live action, or at the end of the animated sequences having the frame rate slow down and the animation break apart when transitioning back to live action, but this will be experimented with later.
I designed the backgrounds of the wolf section this week too, trying to stick to a fairytale-like, ragged style that Martha had expressed wanting, and also so that there is continuity between each scene and the whole section is congruent. These didn’t take too long to design, and neither did matching them up with the right aspect ratio of the film, but cutting them was a bit of a pain as we lost one of the good metal scalpels, so that part took longer than expected.
Background Scans
The puppet making is on track, meaning next week I can start testing textures and some after effects effects and presets on the wolf walk cycle Michael has done a test of, as well as starting to cut out some of the puppets for the first classroom scene. Testing out how the puppets will work in after effects, even with just one small movement, will be very informative for later down the line when the compositions become more complicated as I will be able to focus on the positioning of the image sequences and fiddly aspects of the layering with some prior reference as to how it works, as well as how to make background colours and textures fit in the composition naturally if Martha wants this.
