Finishing Backstage, Car Crashes & Swapmeets

Wednesday July 29 2009

In the studio it's so cold that I turn on the heat gun and hang it from a nail. If you hear that the studio had burnt down then it's probably that or the latex oven that's set to full and door-less.

Today I should probably finish the last shot of BackStage, then I'll think about a couple of re-shoots. I found the things I most used during the shoot were a dental tool for scraping bits of TackyWax; a toothpick for moving eyes; tweezers (pointy and flat); a pen for the dope sheet and that's it. Now you can be a semi-professional animator!

This film has been the first I've animated since working on Mary and Max and the best bit of animating advice is as follows: John Lewis said when moving the characters hands - lead the move with the wrist not the tip of the fingers, let them drag behind. Jason Lynch said when a hand grabs something the progression will have the hand just before the grab then the the next frame has the hand holding the object with a bit of lift. This way you can put the object comfortably into the hand for the lift frame, you don't need the frame where the hand makes initial contact with the object because the brain will make up that frame on its own. To attempt to explain this a little better Jason said picture a car heading to a wall. Animate it getting closer 30cms, 20cms, 10cms and you would think the next frame is the car pushed up against the wall flush just touching it but if you skip that frame and go from that 10cms away straight to the cars front end crushed in. the brain will assume the connecting frame. Ugh, look I'm not Shakespeare that's the best I can do to explain the brain frame thing... 51% in english people...

So let's see... I did a few of the shots with KY lube on the characters because being covered in slime was an important plot point. This is a very messy substance and I understand why naked people wouldn't want any on their clothes... I think there's enough information there to allude to humour. I found a 200mm zoom lens with macro at a swapmeet on the weekend so I was able to shoot close-ups. You'll notice that the final few shots of the film are all close-ups as I got my $30 money's worth.

Erm... well it's been a relatively easy shoot, ran out of time with some costume construction so I made a couple of robot costumes for two of the kids. Damn it's cold. I never got a chance to animate them doing the robot and I didn't really build them well enough for that. Okay hands turning blue. Must start moving to keep blood flowing.

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