Tuesday, June 3, 2008

ANATOMY OF A HAPPY ENDING......

Here's some progress pics of our LAST SET of the film......where Gerald and Edwardo walk off into the sunset together.....
JUSTIN'S ORIGINAL THUMBNAIL











a MOCK UP with old TOBOGGINS and BLANKETS






MARKING the mock ups WITH NUTS ON STRINGS hanging from the ceiling





matching CHICKEN WIRE to the NUT MARKERS











PAPER MACHE-ING THE WIRE with clothes starch and heavy paper strips (as per paper mache master Shelley Nobles' advice)











making the TIE DOWN ACCESS friendlier (less pokey)












more MACHE (3 coats)



















a few coats of PLASTER PARIS, some PAINT, and a top layer of POLYESTER FIBER FILL that i picked up at the fabric store (thanks again to Shelley Noble who pointed me to a Nick Hillingoss link over on stopmotionanimation.com describing how he made some great hills).

i glued the fiber fill down WITH A GLUE/PAINT/WATER MIX to make it stick and give it color. (i first tried dying it with fabric dye but polyester doesn't really take dye so good it turns out.)
the front hill looks too smooth here so i roughed up the fiber fill, and glued dirt from the garden down to the path....



made a sun out of a light fixture cover
painted the backdrop pink to put sky in post......









Justin added LIGHTS last night........

.....And soon we walk off into the sunset......
shel

13 comments:

Shelley Noble said...

Shel--I'm BLOWN away! That money shot at the end looks PERFECT!! I never would have thought to use hanging markers like that--Brilliant! And... you did it so FAST! Holy Moly! (My next film gotta be smaller scale so I can make some moves with it!)

It's a total thrill to watch the two of you work!

Gregory Sesma said...

you guys are soooooo... awesome. always a treat to see your blog.

Shel Wagner Rasch said...

thanks guys!!

it's satisfying exciting to be this close to the happy ENDING!

Craig Harris said...

Awesome work Shel!!! Sooo close now, can't wait to see the film in its entirety. Congratulations you guys!!!

David said...

Awesome set Shel, looks amazing!

Jeff Parrott said...

That set is awesome! The colors are really vivid. When is this gonna be done already?

Sven Bonnichsen said...

Yowza! Depth and form and color and texture... Delicious!

Tennessee Reid said...

Hey really awesome solutions to the set up!!!!

Anonymous said...

WOW!!!

The nuts on strings... That's a great way to track where the peaks and valleys of the mock ups were. Where did you find that idea?

I'm curious what the setting sun is made of, (besides light of course)

Looks great, the only thing I would maybe tweak is the sun- just to make it a little bit hotter, with a tiny bit of lens flare, maybe even have the sky's purple mix with the orange at the seam of the sun (accomplished through lighting flags)

There are some great examples of this sort of thing in Hamilton Mattress (available only on videtape, I think).

All in all, that's an awesome set! I love the grass.

Shel Wagner Rasch said...

hey don,

thanks for the info.

the sun is made from a cheap plastic ceiling light fixture cover. i painted it yellow and then put a light behind it. the first light i put behind it (which made it MUCH brighter!) melted half the cover. fortunately i was able to rotate it around and use the other half.

we did end up finding a brighter but less hot light after i took the pic for this post.

justin has already finished the shot, (he'll post on that soon i'm sure). the animation is awesome and he played with the sky in post gradating the sky and adding beautiful yellow cloud wisps.

what is a lighting flag?

i thought of the nuts on strings the same way i've done everything in stop mo, just improvising my way through....

la la la......

shel

Anonymous said...

Awww, cool, Shel!

I'm looking forward to the animation.

A lighting flag is a large black cloth on a frame used on a shoot to keep light out of part of the composition.

Ryan McCulloch said...

Holy Shizel!!!! I think I just crapped my pants.

Ryan McCulloch said...

Figured I'd clarify that my reaction was because I was blown away by the beauty of this final shot, and not me just being weird.