you are here [x]: Scarlet Star Studios > the Scarlet Letters > lsgl: scattered today
<< before
lsgl: shift F8
after >>
lsgl: the tour
May 23, 2007
lsgl: scattered today
by sven at 11:59 pm
I've been really scattered today.
Probably the most important thing I did: I photocopied my sketches for the revised storyboard -- cut the copies up and taped frames to post-it notes -- and arranged the post-its on a big piece of foam core. Now I can look at my whole movie at a glance. ...Daunting.
(Thanks to Justin Rasch for the idea!)
Remember the shoggoth footage I shot last week? I got it downloaded from the camera and wrote notes on the content of each clip.
The clip above is from a film idea I was playing with back in January 2005: "Why is the sky rotting?" The seething red stuff in the sky is based on footage of boiling sugar. The shoggoth effect is going to be similar.
As a quick experiment, I also tried rendering yesterday's run test as a line drawing. I'm pleased.
Remember how I tried animating a stopmo puppet version of the Elder Thing? I liked it... But I'm pretty sure now that I'm not going to do the Elder Things in the deep history segment in stopmo.
I've got a bunch of reasons:
- The CG "line drawings" have cleaner shapes than any puppet I could make. I worked hard designing the Elders -- I know what their form is supposed to be like.
- The explorers are just silhouettes in this film. If I have the Elder Things be just silhouettes, then it's implied that "living things" are portrayed as silhouettes. I want to keep the explorers and the Elders more separate than that.
- Visually, the Elder Things are supposed to be more "real" than anything else in the film. CG line drawings will help make them seem more real than silhouettes would.
- I want the Elders to be the main characters of this story. It'll be easier to identify with them if they're line drawings than if they're just silhouettes.
- The Elder Things have a really complicated form. I think giving the audience more visual detail will make the critters easier to "read."
- When I animate a CG Elder, I can recycle it quite a bit -- shooting the same creature from different angles. But if I want to recycle stopmo footage, then I only have the camera angle I originally shot from.
Cthulhu is another matter. I'm still thinking that his gelatinous majesty will be done in stopmo. As a biped, the silhouette is relatively easy to read. And visually, a stopmo Cthulhu will contrast nicely with the Elders. (Assuming, of course, that I have enough time to tackle Cthulhu's cameo in the film.)
posted by sven | May 23, 2007 11:59 PM | categories: let sleeping gods lie