By the start of this week, we had finished all the major puppets for each animated section. The puppets and backgrounds we had yet to make were: the planets, volcano and phone in the final section where Ella is telling Lauren how they will manage to stay friends despite being at different schools, then the chair from the first school section and the field fence and sack for stealing the sheep on the wolf section.
Major puppets on the wall
Michael suggested changing the planet and volcano scene from the final section a bit would make the animation more coherent and would fit the narration more, so instead of having the small volcanoes spewing letters on the seperate planets and the old fashioned phone dropping down in front we would have the planets drop down and be pulled to the side, with a large volcano spewing letters and phones ringing on the side coming up. The the large letter transition to the next scene would come from the large volcano. Martha liked this idea and it matched up to the new narration well, so we decided to animate this new sequence instead of the old one.
Martha cut out the chair, a few small children puppets and the sword for the first section and dropped them off on Wednesday for us to use and animate. She also told us the ratio in pixels of the film was 4096 x 1742 in preparation for me putting the composition together in after effects and having the animation be the right size for the film.
By Friday we were ready to start animating using the lightboxes and dragonframe software in the animation studio, so Michael started showing me the software that day.
On Saturday, Martha sent a small powerpoint she put together about her ideas on colours in each animated section. She wanted mostly warm yellow tones for the background of each section and then suggested having moments where rings of colour would appear around puppets at impactful moments, like when the sheep realise the wolf is there in the second scene or the fist comes down in the first scene, sort of like motion lines in comics to suggest impact. I started to have a look on after effects on how to achieve this visual for if we decided to ahead with it after all the physical animating was done. Martha also suggested having the first animation within a puppet theatre, to give it more context as to how it fit in with the girls’ lives and so the viewer is eased into the concept of the animation the first time they encounter it.
Colour references and puppet theatre reference
