Shooting has begun!

I began shooting today! I was planning on starting shooting yesterday, but I caught the dreaded bug my whole family has this week, so things have been relatively slow the last couple days. While I normally work 10-12 hours a day, I can only manage to squeeze out 4 or 5 hours a day since friday without feeling queezy and ill. I think it's strep throat or possibly tonsillitis. Blech. It should be over soon, but thankfully I am ahead of schedule so it's not affecting my work flow in any great way. When I feel sick I just resort to sculpting things or doing small relaxing tasks. Thankfully Ryan was here to help me set up the lights and table this morning.

I finished two shots this morning (about 10 seconds), which I will show you a shot from in a moment, but first... the progress from the last few days...

the finished wall for the pig/time man. Some of the cogs turn and the hands on the clocks. That big evil spikey thing spins as well. It looks like a saw/wheel of death. I don't know what it is to be honest. You can't see the sharp razor edges on it from the picture.


this is that magical insulation foam I talked about filling the puppet heads with before. the red one is firm, and the blue one is like packing peanuts(flexible and squishy)


I used it to create the underground walls, give it a rocky texture.


there are pipes and grates that will fill the space too - and I added some rusty color on top of the black




the hill


after the plaster, I painted it brown, then put a layer of glue and sprinkled some leftover cactus dirt I had in the garage.


broom grass got glue on in bundles in a sort of forced perspective height gradation


this is what the grass looked like when I found it at the dollar tree(normally 8 bucks a piece! I love 99cents stores.




the grass gets a bit sparse in the back since you can't tell on the angle I will be shooting at.




building a grandfather clock from a smaller grandfather clock and some extra wood and the sticks left over from the broom grass


I made the clock face bubble shaped by dribbling some hot glue on the wood.


Ryan helps out with putting the table together. Apparently, Ryan wants to be my apprentice :) For those who don't know, he is normally my sound designer and my only other collaborator in all my animations. he was with me when I first tested out some stop motion with a chunk of playdoh a few years ago.


setting up the lights- the background is made from a vinyl window shade that I spray painted beige and then added transparent layers to. the house is sitting on top of a trashcan and a coffee filter box.


testing out some angles to set the house just right




I am adjusting her eyeball





and finally some shots from the real film!!!! This is from the opening shot. All of these have different color tones since I was playing around this singular images to try and get a feel for the colors I want - so they are all different here.



this is supposed to be a tad later in the day.. 20 minutes or so. All of this takes place at about sunset.


testing different colors




that's all for now. Off I go to continue :)