no nay sayers please

With the ending of the degree show, so ended the making of Heartstrings.

Or so I thought.

Thanks to the involvement of WONKY Films in Bristol, Lefty and Righty have become Knit and Purl. I've been working on some animated shorts to show around to industry types which could eventually bring Knit and Purl to a media device near you.

As part of this I have an E4 sting posted on the E4 website. At the moment it is doing quite well but if any extra YAY! voters want to make themselves heard I'd appreciate it.

I am also now the owner of a very strange pin cushion.

show's over folks

The Graduate Show has now finished and this is what it looked like.

Above is the stop-motion exhibition, and below is my board.

In the middle I put a digital photo frame that played my showreel and the making of heartstrings on a loop. People seemed to like the puppets and it was fun to come in and see them in odd positions after they'd been moved around.

Here is the timelapse edited together to become 'The Making Of Heartstrings'. The music is some of Gareth's banjo fiddling during recording. Am I moving them or are they moving me?

I also fixed the pixely problem I had by re-editing the whole thing and exporting as an .avi. It looks alright now, all ready for festivals.

my first award...ever

Bit of a shock considering had no idea that the award existed this year. I'm not good at talking in front of people even with prior notice so I ended up sounding like an idiot when I collected it. I didn't put any thankyous on my credits because of the time it took to spell everything out in wool so it could've been a good opportunity to at least thank my tutors who were in the room. Instead I just ran away, like Roadrunner, leaving dust clouds behind me.

It's awesome though. Great to know that people like the film.

poster-it notes

The gradution show started last night and to decorate the corridor we all made a poster for our films. These were my post-it ideas. My favourite is the one with a close up of the character's faces with the title in the middle but I didn't have the time to set them up, light them and photograph them. These are the ones I managed to throw together last minute.

I went for the last one. It has the awhh factor, plus I think it's the one I can hang on my wall afterwards without getting sick of it.

mac and pc...can't we all just get along?

Finished the final cut today. Woo hoo. To celebrate I had a nice cup of tea.

I'm having compatability issues due to my lack off mac vs pc knowledge. It's a major frustration when everything is done but the accepted format for submission is .avi which my mac doesn't acknowledge. The mac vs pc adverts make it look like they just throw snide comments at each other...they should change the adverts to a UFC style cage fight, it would be a better representation of the lack of communication

A quick round-up of the last week. I spent Wednesday and Thursday filming the title and credits. Spelling words with string is not as easy as it might sound, and I spent about 5 hours stitching the copyright words, but it worked ok. There's a lot of flicker on the footage but it looks handmade and I don't mind it.

Friday I fiddled around in After Effects until I learned how to paint out the rigging, which I think looks alright but I'll reserve judgement until I see it on a projector. Friday afternoon Gareth came in to uni to record the banjo track. We spent about an hour and a half setting up and then working through the story to fit the music he'd already composed to the extended film. To be honest he did it all. I didn't need to give much input as I liked everything he did. It was interesting to watch his progress with each take.

Then until today I've been editing it all together. It's final running time is 2min52secs. Quite a bit longer than the original 90 seconds. I'm concerned with the image quality at the final export as I haven't compressed anything yet from the original HD image but the Quicktime movie looks a bit pixely. I can only put it down to the fact that I put a slight vignette on it. Also the volume is quieter than I'd expected, but the levels are right so I don't think I can do anything about that now.

Anyway, no time for a rest, on with the work for the degree show.

barry purves used my magnets

Ta-da....the animation is finished. It clocks in at 2 minutes 25 seconds, a full minute longer that I planned for and unfortunately I think it shows towards the end. I had to rush and so lost the characters a bit and just did the movements that were most economical.

It's a relief to be on schedule though.

The puppets held up alright really considering the length of the shot they were in. It wasn't until I scrunched them both down on the floor that I struggled to get them upright again, so the final shot isn't as good as I had in mind. Also, the final shot is supposed to be them hugging, which they are capable of doing, but on camera it looked wrong. One was coming towards the lens and the other away so it ended up looking like one had a giant head. I just had them hold on to each other instead. The eyes started to fall out too because of the amount of holes made in the polystyrene, but I managed.

Barry Purves came to do a masterclass on Friday and saw my film in it's half finished state. He liked it and advised that I be careful to let the acting read, which was a major concern I had about a movement I had done the day before. It's where Lefty points at Righty and then tugs on her string, and I didn't let Righty's reaction to being pointed at settle and read enough, so I think the viewer loses the tugging action. Annoying too because if I had just taken one more frame I could've duplicated it and it would've been fine. Grrrr.

concrete floor + 20 hours of animating = foot pain

So this is from today and yesterday, which were sort of continuous because I didn't go home. I have now experienced what it is like to sleep in the studio and be woken up by a cleaner emptying the bin.

Not fun but it was productive.

I spent 28 hours in the studio, 5 of which were sleeping, and shot 28 seconds. Some was of good quality, some was bad, and at one point in the early hours I became like Mr. Clumsy and kicked the camera tripod. It's at around the 11 second mark in the timelapse and it took my sleep deprived head an age to re-align it, I almost gave up and went home to bed.

As long as I continue to not fuss around with it, I'll have the rest of the animation shot by Monday. Then I can rest my poor aching feet.