Friday, January 27, 2017

Work Log 1/23 - 1/27


Monday: Studying Claymation

Tuesday: Looking over recent movies with Kevin and Brian

Wednesday: Filming with Quinn

Thursday: Researching music videos that incorporate claymation

Friday: Looking for outfits available for claymation

Monday, January 23, 2017

Claymation

Lately, I've been getting back into my interest in films that are made using stop motion, claymation films. Films such as the Wallace and Gromit film series, or Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas and the many films produced by Laika Entertainment.





In the past stop motion was always something I had interest in when I was younger and now have found my interest again due to music videos such as Madvillian's Strange Ways music video and Fleet Foxes' White Winter Hymnal music video.



 So, now I'm interested in and considering making a stop motion short film using clay and other materials. I'm gonna start writing the script this week and then after that see what my limits are, what I can and cannot do, how I will do it, and go on from there.

Before I actually start on the short I want to make a couple of tests to see what works and what doesn't and how I can use the Adobe softwares as best as I can for it.

I've been thinking about concepts for the story of the short film and whether to take just a typical whimsical story approach or maybe make it political in a sense, I'm brainstorming different idea but we'll see what I come up with.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

2nd Marking Period Checkpoint

END OF THE MARKING PERIOD CHECKPOINT #2:

In the second marking period I focused more on writing scripts and coming up with short film ideas that would be practical to film within or outside of school. While it's bad to limit creativity and such, it's much easier to have your limits on script-writing when it comes to practicality. This is because alot of the time what ends up happening is that I write scripts that I usually end up never filming and "saving it for later" so it's much easier writing scripts you're sure you can be able to film without certain issues holding it back.

When brainstorming with scripts I still use the Plotagon software to make models of what I imagine characters looking like and dressing up like. As well as using it for makeshift storyboards for the time being as you can put the characters you make into scenes and type in dialogue and action for them, although only two characters are allowed to be in the scenes you can make which hinders some things, but like I said it's just a makeshift storyboard for the time being.






Besides script-writing I also have been working with Tommy and Brian acting in their films, and we filmed a fight scene for fun and for Brian to test out some motion tracking and lighting and it ended up turning out good.

I've also caught an interest in music video editing, specifically type of music videos that have scribble or art over the original shots taken from a camera and then drawn over frame by frame in post production. I've tried testing it out in After Effects but I need to practice a bit more because it didn't turn out that good but practice makes perfect. Here's an example of what I mean.


For the next marking period I definitely want to focus on actually shooting the scripts I write rather than just writing more scripts, or just filming even if it's just test footage for after effects and such.