Helldunkel

This is a blog about my creative process for my final animated film at Concordia University.

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YES

I am finally in production! I shot a bunch of stuff, and I just posted my favorites! Keep looking as I will post everything I did in the coming days.

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sleeping shot

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my favorite take of this new shot I just tought of!

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first try on the headbanging shot

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So here is my new animatic. The puppet in it is still the same stop-motion puppet as for my last project. The girl in red with a bunny mask. And the shot with white yarn will have measuring tapes unraveling on top of it.

the text is

       You've unplugged everything in your house so that all that is left is you.              You're banging your head against the wall. Slowly. Not frenetically like                everybody pictures it. Bam, bam, bam. The noise is the only thing left                  proving you're alive. The only real thing is the noise. Concentrate on the              noise you can hear it, it proves you exist. It hurts too much otherwise.

       You will sleep, live here forever and when you wake up you can continue            the banging, tangible, audible proof of you. Getting the hurt out in sounds.          Cut, cut, cut. Quick. Like scratches, small scratches. So you feel something        other than numb. You stop crying when you cut it open. One fluid flowing          out at a time, never two.

       Do you exist if you don't feel? Killing yourself is too much trouble, effort,            insurmountable mountain of acts. You just want to cease being. You never        asked to be here.

       It hurts. It hurts so much, the weight of it all. It hurts so fucking much all the        time. So far down help can't reach. Slice it up. Your heart feels so heavy            and you only want to be light. Blood pouring out, tears running down, food        coming up. Makes you lighter. Food coming. So little (always too much. No        difference between a gram and a kilogram). All I want, all you want, is to be        as nothing as I feel, as you feel.

       The slowest suicide. The polite way out. You will never say “I'm sorry”                enough so that people will understand you're sorry, all this time, sorry for            your own damn existence.

      You don't know why you're crying anymore, but it feels so right.

I wrote it during a bad anxiety attack and I feel so close to it, it is going to be hard to read and to show the film. I don’t know. I still feel unsure. Like why would people be interested in that. It just sounds so dumb now. Oh and I have to learn how to knit. Bleh, I am still overwhelmed by this class.

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Long time no see

Alright, so I changed my film. After having an excruciating meeting with a guest reviewer at school, I finally came to terms with the fact that my first project wasn’t going in the direction I wanted at all. What I thought was interesting about it wasn’t speaking through and the project became this kind of Hydra creature that I felt I couldn’t challenge anymore.

So now, my project is a really more a personal one, more contemplative. It still feels so hard to begin working on it, and the anxiety of this project is still sky-high, but now I think I can actually finish the thing in time. 

I don’t know.

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I hurt my wrist

yep. I don’t exactly know what happened or what I did wrong, but my wrist really really hurt, even when resting. I think it’s a combination of me not holding the gym machines well and having to do really repetitive movements at work as well as having to handle heavy charges with my hand alone. So I called in sick to work today to try and rest it, in the hopes that it will get better on its own.

No luck so far. Voltaren helped a little bit... I’m afraid this’ll put the film in jeopardy if it gets worse or if I can’t use my hand for long periods of time. 

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Here is the almost final version of the animatic! There is a couple of key sounds missing and like one or two images, but it’s mostly there :) I will show it to Julie Roy in class on November 24. I’m stressed out about this but I think it will go well. I hope you guys enjoy.

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This one is my favorite! I had so much fun animating it! I think it moves well and I think I will be able to handle the armature and puppet well. I’m not afraid that I will be able to animate with subtlety, so that’s great. I will add epoxy near the hip, because that part is too loose, but at the same time it’s missing the additional nut and brass tube. Also this test was made with the crap tie-downs, so that’s a good sign that my animation will go well when I will have the actual intended tie-downs :) I’m pretty happy. 

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Ok so this is the second test I did, I had shady tie-downs and it was a pain to animate and I don’t like doing walk cycles because they’re so hard! Anyway so I don’t think I will use that kind of walk for her because it just looks so funny and I’m not doing a funny film I think. This kind of walk wouldn’t fit in the kind of mood I’m aiming for. At least it was a good test, and I know I will definitely be able to animate her. The wire is good, this quality is better than what I used in my last stop-motion so that’s cool.

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So this is the first animation test I made. It’s super fucked up because I forgot my actual tie-downs at home so I had nothing to hold it up well. 

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And here it is in construction! The armature is made of triple twisted aluminium wire, brass tubes, epoxy and epoxy putty. The brass tubes are there to ensure I can hold and move the arms and legs well and not having the wire give out to much. 

I loved building it, it’s always the best part to build everything :) Nuts were added onto the feet, to tie her to the ground and i will also had a nut in her hip as well as a tiny brass tube, so that she can sit down and not move around too much, and also to ensure that she can jump and run around with the help of a simple rig.

Her head is going to be a carved styrofoam ball with a round brass tube so that it is removable.

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Alright! So the top image is what the stop-motion teacher drew for me when I went to ask him about shoulder joints and middle of the foot joints. The second image is my idea of what the ball and socket armature would have looked like. I think it was a fair plan to be honest, but for the puppet to be as thin and frail looking as I would have liked I would have had either to make the puppet enormous which would then have resulted in an monstrous set or I could have bought tiny balls, but then I wouldn’t have had access to such precise machinery to drill the holes required and everything. So after many tears and freaking out episodes, I decided that a wire armature would be fine.

So the last picture is the plan for the wire armature. It is all dirtied up now because I can’t keep a clean sketchbook to save my life. However I think you can still see pretty well what’s happening.

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Here is some composition research sketches I did when working on my storyboards. It is so interesting and stimulating to do those and to ask yourself how to make the shot more interesting, more dynamic. What would make the viewer stop and ask himself where I got the idea to shoot it like that. I want to create wow moments. I want people to grin just because it is such a cool shot. Yeah I love doing those composition things, it’ so satisfying.

The last image is a redesign of Ruby, the protagonist, because I had comments that the firsts designs made her look like Donnie Darko or some murderous character. So yeah, not good. I want her to be cute, but dirty, but adorable. I will use the design on the far left, but the dress will have no pockets (or only one) and buttons down the front. Also I named her Ruby because initially it was supposed to be a foam latex puppet, which is like rubber, and like I figured a cutesy name for Rubber would be Ruby. 

At the Montreal Stop-Motion Film Festival I had a talk with the lady that made the puppets for Cordell Barker’s If I was God, and she told me she used foam mattress to make the inside of her puppets. Because this material is super cheap, you know the yellow foam inside 90′s couches, and the thing takes back its shape so you can animate it well and it’s easy to carve and you can glue it with contact spray glue and then if you break the armature you can just cut the puppet open, fix it and then glue it back closed. So I’m gonna do that instead.

Foam Latex is such a pain to be honest, I’m happy I won’t be doing any. I have barely enough time to do everything in my life, so I don’t know where I would have found any time to do some molds and then how to inject it well and then where to bake this nasty stuff... ugh.

Also if you fuck it up you wreck your armature and that’s like a disaster.

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Wow ok I’m sorry for the trash photos. I can’t find the original jpeg I made for the final thumbnails storyboard and I can’t/don’t want to upload this whole pdf here.... I will see if there is anyway for me to upload better images than this. But yeah this is my final thumbnail storyboard. 

I had a lot of issues with making this story interesting enough and with a point I guess. Still stuck in the “why would anyone watch this film” fear I have.

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This is the first iteration of the thumbnail storyboard. It is not exactly what I presented in class, because hearing the comments for the other projects helped me a lot and I changed a bunch of things. But for the record here it is. 

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Treatment

I also wrote a thing about how I will treat this film, but it’s in french, because I can’t write in english well enough to have a good grade. So here it is in french. I will translate it loosely further down this post, so scroll down if you can’t read french.

     Helldunkel va être réalisé en animation stop-motion. Je crois que c'est la meilleure technique pour réaliser ce film, parce que selon moi d'avoir un set complet fait en miniature va rajouter au sens d'émerveillement et à la beauté du film, qui sont les deux aspects principaux que je veux exprimer dans ce projet. Il y a quelque chose de spécial, d’intrigant où d'attirant pour le spectateur qui comprend que le décor et les marionnettes sont réelles.

      Visuellement, je souhaite que le film joue beaucoup sur le clair-obscur, que l'éclairage imite les rayons de soleil qui passent dans la poussière. Le film va être sur un rythme assez lent, pour laisser le temps au personnage de découvrir l'endroit qu'elle explore et de laisser ce sentiment de beauté et d'émerveillement s'installer. Je pense a quelque chose vaguement inspiré de ce que le film The Maker projette comme ambiance. 

     Il n'y aura pas de dialogue, seulement de la musique composée spécialement pour ce projet ainsi que du foley. La musique va servir à mettre l'emphase sur l'atmosphère du film. De plus, puisque le personnage sera une marionette dont le visage ne sera pas animé, la musique servira également à faire comprendre au public ce qu'elle ressent, sans tomber dans le ''Mickey Mousing''. Je pense à quelque chose de plus subtil. J'espère que la trame musicale sera très riche et complexe pour la fin du film, avec une montée de tension jusqu'au dénouement.

So basically what it says is that Helldunkel will be a stop-motion film, because this technique will add to the sense of wonder for the audience and to the feeling of magnificence. Because there is something special I feel about knowing that everything was handmade and really exist and is touchable.

Visually I want the film to really play with the clair-obcur, and with the depth of colours and light. If possible I’d really like to be able to mimic sun rays in the dust, and dust clouds and that kind of dead atmosphere. I want the film to feel really slow so the feeling and setting of the atmosphere has time to install itself. I’d like it to feel a bit like The Maker...

There will be no dialogue or narration, only music especially composed for the project, through the composition collaboration thing we have at school and foley I will record with some friends. I hope not to fall on “Mickey Mousing” the whole thing, since the character has a mask I will try to rely on the soundtrack to communicate her emotions. For now I wish the musical score to be rich and complex at the end of the piece and simple and slow at the beginning to really emphasis the tension.

We will see how it will evolute, I’m sure I will change my mind 3000 times for the music. I’m also afraid to not be able to make the lighting as pretty as I imagine it :/ I don’t know, I have so much anxiety about this project as a whole. I’m afraid I will cut corners everywhere and that the piece will fall flat, or short of my expectations for it.