Degree show and Graduation

Now that all the hard work on The Piper was over it was time to get ready for the university Show and Tell degree show. This where all the university's Art and design departments are open to the public, so they can come and take a look around all the final year students work on display

While i was setting up my section of the degree show I came out of the animation department and I was shocked and over the moon to see that The Piper had been used on a banner to promote the animation department. It was a very amazing thing to see my characters on a 5 foot size banner and I felt very lucky that my work had been chosen.

The degree show lasted a week and was brilliant to see people's reaction to everyone’s films and hard work.

For all you who could not make it to the degree show here is a short video by Rich Lee and Alan Bennett with a nice interview with myself talking all things Piper

So now the degree show was over the next step was the big one, Graduation! This was a crazy broiling hot day and grate way to say good bye to university life but hopefully not the last time see you your mates.

Very embarrassing photo

A completely unexpected thing happened as I stood in the wings of the stage getting ready to walk on and shake the deans hand, the speaker stopped reading the names From the Stop Motion Animation and puppet making class and said and the winner of Outstanding Creative Achievement In Design: Graphics and Animation is awarded to Daniel James! Well I was of course dumfounded and did not believe it. I walked out on stage a bit like a zombie, shook the Deans hand and only when I had sat down it hit me what jus happened.

My First Class Honers degree

winning this award was truly a grate honer out of the whole university my work was selected for this award and for that I am very grateful. I would like say now a massive thank you to every on who has helped me on this project, to my tutors for nominating me and to the heads of the Arts and design department who selected me to win.

Here is The Piper and his award!

This was the icing on the cake, I can now proudly say I could not of received any higher of an achievement for my time at university. It's now time for the scary part, where I levee the comfort of education and step out into the big wide animation world.

Wish me luck :D

Making of The Piper part 3

Animation:

With the puppets and set completed it was time to get animating on the film. Due to story points I had to shoot a dream sequence and one of the last shots for the film first, it had to be done this way as I needed the park set to be fully clean. Once all the shots were completed I had to take a week out of animating and messy the park up, add a fence and trees. In planning my animation time sheet I had to shoot the story in chunks all facing the same camera angels. This was important to get right as the sun is setting toughout film and I was painting the background by hand as I went on.

The first two weeks of animating were with all that kids paying on the equipment in the park. These were all shot of two's at 25 fps as i wanted the kids animation to have a more classic children's tv show vibe. However the Piper himself was animated on ones this was to give him more fluid movements and allow him to play his pipe in sync, it also helps to sell the fact that The Piper is not from this world and gives him a very different feel. Here is a slide show that shows the animation process and the order I shot the film in.  

 

Editing:
Editing on The Piper was the first time i really used After effects to its full advantage, as i haven't had much experience with After Effects i asked my may friend Frank Mansfield for some advice. There were 6 main shots where I used After Effects for: rig removal, light tracking, colour correction and green screen removal.

 I edited the film as I went along, animating in the day and adding in the new shots on the night. The dead line on completing this Film was the tightest it has been for me. on the day before hand in I finished animating the final shot with the Piper and all 7 kids at 5pm and was up editing in the final shots, making the final touches, fully syncing up the music and adding in the sounds fx till 7am of the day of Hand in. I uploaded the film on to Vimeo, did the last part of the right up and handed in all my work. 

Reactions:
I had The Piper online viewable to the public for 2 days after it was completed, and in that time that feedback has been amazing! I sent the link to a large number of animation friends and here are some of their brilliant comments.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everyone who has watched The Piper and commented on it as means a lot! To the ones who have no seen The Piper yet it will be back online once the festival runs are over.

The Making of The Piper Part 2

Hi guys welcome back to the making of my final graduation film The Piper. In my last post I gave you a insight into the per production work and in this post I will cover the making of the Puppets, set, props, and animation.

 Making The Piper Puppet:
 This slideshow shows how I made the Piper puppet form my first designs to the final character on  set. The armature is from animationtoolkit.co.uk and was cover in foam to pad out the body shape. The sculpted clay head was set into a silicone mould and casted up using a fast setting resin. The suite was hand stitched by my self working from a pattern that was kindly given to me. The hands are made form silicone and hair is made out of a fur fabric that was coloured in using a number of different sharpies.

 Making The Kids puppets:
 This slideshow shows how the all 7 kid puppets were made. I had 3 Ball and socket armatures and 4 wire armature that were from animationtoolkit.co.uk. The armatures were covered in foam to give etch kids a different body shape. To save time all the kids had the same head, this was sculpted in clay, set into a silicone mould and casted up 8 times using a fast setting resin. All the kids costumes were made the amazing first year student Cat Hayes, check out her work hear!. The hands are made form silicone. The hair was made by my self and to second year students RobMillard and Giselle Schiniou (click names to see there work) layering up meany hair extensions over a foam core. Once fully dry I would cut it into the desired shape.

 Making The Park Set:
 This slideshow shows the construction of the park set. I started off by covering the Animation table with a big black sheet that I stuck down with PVA glue. Once dry I glued down sawdust in to the shape of the pathway rolling over it till flat. I did the same technique for the chip wood in the main play ground but instead of saw dust I used torn up chunks of cardboard. To make the sky / backdrop i got a 1 meter by 2 meter size strip of blue fabric. I painted on the clouds with poster paint as it seeps into the fabric, I would paint this sky more orange tough out the film to so show that the sun is setting. The chip wood and sawdust were painted with a mix or poster a acrylic paints.

I made all of the play ground equipment my self with scraps pieces of wood, wire and foam board, a part from the seesaw witch I got my good friend Zeke Ares to make, check out his work here! I made the play ground clean first then once all the shots were completed I messed up the play ground. To messy up and to make play ground feel more like a cage for the kids I added a fence all around the park, i also added trees all along the back and sides of the park. this helped me get some every interesting depth and lighting on set. The tree were made out of poster tubes sprayed in glue, rolled in saw dust, painted up and glued to the set.

Thanks for reading guys and as always your comments, questions and feedback are very welcome! Coming soon the making of The Piper part 3.

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.

Making of The Piper Teaser Trailer

I know its a later then i pland but here is the making of The Piper Teaser Trailer. way back in summer I got the idea of doing a retelling of the pied piper, with my twist. As soon as I got that Idea I started sketching quick designs for the piper and the playground itself. As I was not doing a straight retelling I wanted to have hints to the original story buy having rocking horses that look like rats in the park.

I had a very lose idea for how I wanted the piper to look , so I did several pages of just random face designs. To help me come up with different ideas I looked into as many of the different retellings of the original story as I could find.

After doing the quick concept sketches I wanted to see if the design I liked would work well in 3D. As I was sculpting I felt that the design of the hair did not look right as a 3D sculpt . I tried out a number of different hair styles till I got a look that I liked

 

After plenty of research and feedback I sculpted The final Ppiper

Happy with the sculpt I removed the head and got it ready to cast up to make the silicon mould from it. To make it castelbel I had to remove the hair and make holes in the head to show where they will go. Once the silicone mould was made and the clay head was taken out I got to cast the head up by using a two part fast cast resin.

As this was a teaser trialer i wanted to keep the look of the piper a secret till the final film. So i strated off by making an all black test head that I will use for the trailer. To make his hair I made foam cone shapes that I glued around some wire and placed into the pre made dents in the head. Then the long process started were I had to glue each hair on to the foam to give the look and texture of hair that I wanted. 

 

The next step for me was to make the ball and socket armature that the piper will have, so he can do the graceful movements required in the final film. this was kindly supplied by Animation Toolkit to check out all the awesome goods on the site click here!!  

 Once the armature was made I then glued the foam over it. When dry I cut the foam down into the required body shape. to make the pipers outfit i got a pattern from a producer mate that im not aloud to say the name of just yet . With some slight adjustments to the shape it fit the piper grate.

 The Piper on set

The making of the roundabout, its amazing what several coats of paint on a old chopping board with a cardboard tube and some drinking straws glued on to it can do. 

These images show the making of the: park gates, rocking rats and the swings. The Ground on the swings set was done the same way as the main park set, using chunks of ripped up cardboard glued to a wooden board then painted over with several cotes. 

 I am right now in the middle of the full productionon on the final Piper film. Now that the trialer has been out for 2 mouths i have been amazed by the grate feedback i have got back from it. I would like to take this chances to say a big thankyou to all who has seen and comented on the video it meens a lot! 

The Piper Teaser Trailer 2012 from Daniel James on Vimeo.