The Shooting Process

Before shooting we had to rearrange our workspace into a shooting area and a making space. Below you can see a few photos of our layout with all of our intial concept art up on the wall beside it.

During the shooting process I'll take some photographs to document it and put them into catergories below by each scene. Today we did a small warm up with the shot "...and threw the kittens down the stairs" to practice lighting and camera angles. This won't be the final shot, but just a test.

Filming "The Story of Cruel Frederick"

Above: Shooting the tryptych.

Above: Creating a track for the camera and testing the lighting [introducing Frederick].

Above: improvised middle shot compared to the storyboard [scene 1].

Above: Replacing the knock with a doorbell for ease [scene 5].

Above: Animating a tricky scene of Frederick picking up a spatula, shoving a chair out the way and backing Tray out of the kitchen.

Above: Setting up for Tray's breakfast feast.

Above: Adapting the track to work diagonally.

Above: Working on a shot taken from the hallway.

To Summarise:

The entire filming process involved a lot of problem solving, especially when it came to lighting and creating track shots. We also had multiple problems with the puppets due to poor neck mechanisms and the failed magnet technique for rigging. Despite all of this, we managed to successfuly film all of the required shots - constantly adjusting the storyboard as we went along; cutting unneccsary scenes [or ones that were just not logistically possible], adding new scenes to better narrate the story or redesigning shots for more dynamic angles.

The 2 and a half weeks were really stressful and we were working non-stop, but we're really proud of the shots we had taken. The filmed outcome was far better than we had expected. Personally, the only disappointment I had was in the quality of the puppet animation and attention to detail in the puppets faces. When reviewing the footage, there were a lot of mistakes that needed to be photoshoped and, in general, the actual animating was a bit rough and jittery at points. On the whole, this didn't affect our film as it sort of worked with the genre and narrative.

From here, Finnan took all the footage and began editing, while I took on the role of animating the eyes with Photoshop and ProCreate. In the following post I'll cover this in a bit more detail.