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.

Surge (War of the worlds)

The last project I have been helping out on for my assistant animator brief is a stop motion trailer for ‘The War of the Worlds’ by Zeke Ares, but due to copyright it was changed to the new title of ‘Surge’. I have been very excited about this project for a long time. Zeke told me he wanted me to be working on this way back in 2011 as I am a big fan of War of the Worlds and I jumped on the chance to work on it. I was made the lead animator right away, so I knew I would not be doing much on this project until we came to animating, but as things were being built I could not keep way and helped.
 

As soon as Zeke had the first small tripod (core pod) puppet test made he handed it over to me so I could do a walking test and show how a stop motion tripod would move. I spent the rest of that day animating the test, taking my time so I could get the motion right. The end result was that the core pod did move very slowly but I was happy to get the motion of three legs right. And for the final animation we would speed up the moment of the legs.

Happy with the test, I wanted to do more tests as we had this idea of making the core pods jump and land on people. To make this jump test look more like a shot from the film I took Zeke's old War of the Worlds inspired diorama he made back in 2011. I spent two days animating this test as I had to work around the limitations of the set, mostly waiting for the glue and paint to dry. The puppet also had to be screwed to the sets and attached to a jumping rigged which was painted out in the editing.

When I showed Zeke the test he was over the moon with the test shots he turned round and told me he wanted to make me the Co-Director of the project. This would give me more of a creative input as to how some shots would look, as well as sharing story ideas, and to help out when doing the after FX and editing. I jumped at this chance and was so pleased that he had let me be such big part of his final film. 

I won’t go into too many details on how the shoot went as the film will not be released online until 2013, and there will be a more detailed post on the animating and editing side of the production then. But what I will tell you is that Zeke and I did the entire Stop motion shoot and we had a brilliant 2D and after FX team. There was also so one big shot that we shot using 3 cameras from 3 different angels all at the same time.

For more info Check out Zeke’s production blog here 

www.zekeares-animationcreation.blogspot.co.uk/

If you can’t Waite until 2013 here are the two test animations I did to give you guys a tees of what to expect. And as always your comments and feedback are welcome.