facial expressions

Lighting

Lighting was a bit of a difficulty for us, it took us atleast one hour everytime we set up to sort out lighting before we could film. The problem we had was our sets were quite small and whenever we tried to create a theme with the lighting ot create some depth we always had problems with it not refelcting on to teh set the way we imagines it, we played around a lot with the appature and exposure on the camer and even used flash while having lighting to create the mood we wanted. Altouhg we worked really hard on lighting i dont think the outcome was great. In scenes such as the outdoor scene where the man is creeping up to the yetis window, we wanted it to look like daylight so it was bright and sunny, we wanted it to come to life, to make the audience feel teh atmoshphere but it didnt turn out that way at all, it was difficult to undertsand how lighting can work on black as well because most of our set was black and red, i think this made it much more difficult to work with. We also had problems creating depth within the scenes, everything looks almost flat, I think the use of colours we used werent the best but from this i learnt a lot and hopefully will be ready to undertstand lighting further in with future projects.
The lecture with Jon Wood was extremely inspiring and eye opening. The tuorial on lighting really helped me understand positioning and use of lighting from a directors point of view.

Photo shop sets

I made some sets up on photoshop by taking images from google and fixing them to create set ideas for our Animation.

Acting it out.

To help make the movements in our animation more realistic, we produced some acting clips, Sarah and Katie worked on these whil the rest of us were working on teh characters.
I think they helped us in preperation because sometimes you get to the set and think, ok how does the character respond to this or this, so it really helped to spark our imaginnation and undertsand movements better.

Clothing the main character

 

We had quite a few problems with the armiture for the main character. We had to make it three times due to lack of flexibility and uneven weight distribution. The first times his arms were far too long and he couldnt stand up. The second time he was too short and his legs, due to being very small, became very stiff and so we didnt have enough flexiblity in them, after failing twice at making the armiture, and already being behind schedule we started to panic and were worried we would need to make a new armiture from scratch or maybe even change the entire design of the character which would be wuite upsetting. So we took advice from Ben and started in a new armiture, actually Ben made the armiture for us, he made him a little taller and secured him together very well so that we could animate freely with him.
After the process of putting him together, I took him home and stared making his clothes. Although in the script it descirbes him having a clothes change, we deciede to stay to one outfit, this would make him seem more lazy. I decided to choose a stripeyfabric for his pyjamas becaus it matches the chair and curtain props in our animation. I think it helps the eye when having matching items in film, especially for kids.It almost gives him a personality or a theme rather.

developing characters

To make the stomach for the Yeti, we tried many things such as foam, bubble rap and masking tape to even our his weight distribution.

This is the armiture for the yeti, the only problems we encountered with this one was that the hands kept falling of but nothing too serious, we were able to fix this quickly and leave it over night to dry, I was then able to take it home and start layering the plastercinr on to his arms and stomach and then move on to the clothing. I couldnt find any suitable fabric that was in the colour we had for our final design so again changes had to be made, i found a fluffy white fabric and was able to work with that. I made a one piece suit that he could fit in to just by lifting his arms upwards.

After finishing the suit, the fabirc was too long and made him look way to big so I trimmed it down a little and it gave of a much better effect.

animatic

We made the animatic quite quicly, at this pont we where behind in filming due to delays in prepersation and set making so we made a rough take of what was going to happen through out the animation.