The Making of The Piper 1

Well I know it's been a long time sins I last blog any news. As you may have guessed I have been incredibly busy the last 7 mouths. However now university is now all over I plan on getting you all up to date with a sires of new posts.  A good place to start off with is a little film called The Piper.

The Making of The Piper 1

If you follow my work you will know i have been working on this film for the past year. Just before christmas i created a teaser trailer in order for me to work on this idea for the entreaty of my final university year. hopefully you have seen the making of that I posted back in February if not feel free to check it out in my older posts.  

Now that I have finished the film I can now show you all how I made it.  As you can imagine there was a lot of work that went into the film so I have decided to go over the highlights in part 1 and show you a set of making of slide shows in part 2. 

Firstly id like to mention the Armatures and Materials for all of the puppets in The Piper have been sponsored by Animation Toolkit. I have been very fortunate to have been in contact with owner of Animation Toolkit Wes Wood for a number of years, he is an awesome chap and incredibly generous. I was given enough joints, balls, rods and plates from his amazing Ray Harryhausen approved Armacreature sets to make 4 puppets, 1 Piper and 3 of the kids. with the other 3 kids been made out of the wire armature kits. 

I would highly recommend this kit to all you stop motion guys, there is so much potential to what you can create with the kit, may it be human character or your classic creature like the legend Mr Ray Harryhausen would make. To see all the brilliant stock check out AnimationToolkit here! 

 With out the generous help of Animation Toolkit I could not have made The Piper full stop! I'd like to take this time to say a massive thank you to Wes Wood for making this possible and I hope you are as happy with the final film as i am! 

Storyboarding / animatic:

Once I got the script and designs finalised it was time to storyboard the film, I stared off by thumb nailing out the whole story.

With my drawing skills not been the best I decided to get a story board artist Chloe Howley in. I gave Chloe a copy of the script, designs and my thumb nails to and she got back to me with some amazing story boards. 

Sadly Chloe could not board the whole film so I got my Step sister Nadia McLoughlin to takeover.

Once all the boards were competed I started editing them together into the animatic. Creating this animatic was a brilliant way for me to show my production team and mentor what exactly I wanted to do in this film. This also managed to help convince the tutors that I needed to book out and have the set attached to the animation table for 2 mouths solid.

Here is a snippet from the animatic.

Music:

I was very fortunate to get composer Brett McCoy to create original music for film. I gave Bret almost free rain when creating the music for the Pipers playing. however i had the idea to have the boys and girls come out to play theme plying when ever we see a new park set. Brett Worked to the timing and music keys I set up in the animatic with a temp track with music from films and tv.

Bret did an amazing job of the music and id like to say a massive thank you! The Piper would be nothing with out his music.

Cheek out Brett's other work here!

Thanks for reading guys and as always your comments and feedback are very welcome! Coming soon the making of The Piper part 2.