Progress

Ideas and Screen Boards

The Green Dream:

This was my first idea for the puppet project. I was inspired by Bran's Green Dream scene from The Game of Thrones.

Here is the video:

I thought this scene would look particularly good if done with shadow puppets. I had a specific music video in mind by Little Dragons:

I enjoyed the way they made the forest. All these layers of fabric made it look as if everything is in a fog. 

The Bear Fight:

This idea was inspired by The Games of Thrones again, specifically The Bear And The Maiden scene.

I thought it would be nice to concentrate on the bears and Brienne's relationship with no interruptions; to show the power game between them and how it moves from bear to Brienne and then bear again. I imagined it as a wave: the power and their both physical forms would grow from nothing and then go down again.

The idea with clay was inspired by a small part of Lithuanian singers music video that I've seen years ago. After thinking about the Bear Fight scene the memory of the music video just popped back into my head.

The specific part I was inspired by - 1:28 - 1:38

My video is going to be a stop frame animation. I am going to take a picture after every change I do to the clay and then add all photos into one video.

Study of the scene

I went through the whole video and collected all of these screen captures. Again, I concentrated on the bear and Brienne.

Just studying the colours of this particular capture, because my video is going to show the whole fight from the inside of the 'cage/arena'. I will need to make a proper stage for my clay work. I believe I will paint the fence on a card and try to get something similar to the original one (picture below). For the ground I thought about using a real sand but because I am working with clay the sand would stick to it and everything would be too messy. So I will try to get some large sheets of sanding paper. I already tried to buy some but the only ones I found are sold in a small square sheets.

The Play Doh

I always have some clay at home just because I might get inspired to create something. But the only clay I can get from shops is air drying. This little scene that I want to create is going to take me awhile because stop frame animation is time consuming and air drying clay is not a good choice for it. So I bought some play doh just for practice and this is a short video I made using it :

The bear in the video is really close to my camera so I tried to move my play doh as far as the platform I created lets me, this is what I got :

It is still too close and as I will need to fit two figures into the shot I decided to change my set and at the same time improve it a bit. In the picture above you can see that my platform is very simple - white material on the ground and brown paper as the arena wall/fence. I already had some problems with the brown paper - it is very light and falls down easily. I can't have that because I will leave my platform while shooting the final video and come back to it even after days passed by; I can't have any changes in the next picture - everything has to look the same.

Making A New Set 

I started to make my platform a bit more secure. The most important part was to secure the wall to the base. I used a simple plywood and covered it with brown material for rougher texture:

I used PVA glue and just soaked the material with it to create not such a smooth surface. As you can see my plywood had some holes in it but as I am planning to paint the wall in grey (or even paint the fence on it) with acrylics, it won't matter at the end.

I bended the plywood and marked it on the base. Then I glued some smaller wood pieces on the base so the wall would go into these slots.

I knew that these small pieces of wood wont hold my wall in place perfectly, but I needed some sort of force to keep the plywood bended while I nail it stronger to the base:

This is how the whole set looks like at the moment:

What to improve more:

1. Create the ground. I will use a per mache to hide the wood and nails and to create the impression of uneven dirt.

2. Paint the wall. In grey at first just to see how it would look like and then decide if it need more detail to it ( aka fence).

New Clay

I noticed that the pay doh was not holding its weight property. When I made the little video that creature I build had 4 legs to hold itself from the ground and yet it was slowly sinking down. So I got some porcelain clay from my university and it is perfect for this project: it is heavy (it holds itself nicely even when you build something tall), I have a huge amount of it (I noticed the lack of play doh even for that small creature video) and porcelain clay does not dry in air.

This is how the bag looks like:

Experiment to see if this clay holds its weight better then the play doh:

Cheeking the cameras angle

1.

2.

 3.

 4.

The first one seems to be too close, I took this one with my camera on the platform.
The last one seems to be taken from too high up.

I like the second and the third ones the most.

Improving the platform

Making the ground with paper mache:

It hide the nails and wooden pieces perfectly and created the uneven edge between the ground and the wall that looks more realistic.

Painting the wall in grey:

I used acrylic paint for the wall and the ground too:

I used some hair spray for the ground to make it harder. The wall still needs a few more coats and then my set will be finished.

Video Progress 

I had a few issues while filming this video. One of them was the sword - the original idea was to make the sword appear slowly/build up the same way the clay figure emerged from a small piece of clay. But it just kept falling down because the clay is very heavy. The heaviness is good for a big sculptures. It keeps them secured on the ground even when the upper part of the sculpture is bended forward (as seen in my experiment previously). For this video I used a toothpick for the sword but I know how to fix this problem in my future video. I will use a toothpick to keep the straight shape of the sword but I will cover it in clay so it would look like it is emerging out of the hand.

The other problem I had was the platform, the paper mache base. As I mentioned before the clay is very heavy but it is also wet. The platform is made mainly from a newspaper and after I took the last picture for the stop frame animation video this is how my set looked like:

This is also an easy fix. I will repaint the the platform with acrylic paint and add a few layers of UHU glue then paint with the acrylics again. This will harden the platform and maybe reduce the damage that is done during the shooting.

Unedited video

I started to shoot another video with more pictures in it and more action. In my previous video I made 93 pictures. In this one I took 320. This video is unedited. I put it together just for the presentation I am doing at the university so I would not need to explain my progress in words.

I can see the improvement with every new stop frame animation I am making and I am very pleased with this one. However, in the Game of Thrones episode the Bear Fight is much more darker. The atmosphere feels colder, more grey. So I want to edit my pictures and change that :

The original:

Edited image:

I will go through all 320 pictures and change that.

I am using Adobe Premier editing program and even though I know how to use it I am not a professional with it. You might see how the quality of this video improved from the one before. It is all because I am reading more about Adobe Premier and gaining new skills with it.

Green Screen

I am thinking of using some green screen effects for my video to make it more dramatic. I am considering rain, dust or fog at the moment.

I decided not to use dust and fog/smoke, because it looks too pretty and I need my video to look dark and cold. And so I will use rain:



You can barely see the rain here on an even background, but I tried other green screen rain footages and the rain there was too strong, it distracted the viewer from my clay figures.