Theme Book. More research and pre-production planning occurred during this production than our past projects. We even had the luxury of a script! Given this was a family short, good visuals are a key component to keeping the interest of the little ones. A lot of material was reviewed about David, Goliath, Saul, the Philistines ranging from cartoons to historical and biblical lectures. As a result, the script and visuals started to mature.
Take copious notes. Every time a quote, element or idea inspires you - write it down. Don’t be concerned about format or structure. Simply capture these creative sparks.
Build your deck. Using Spike Lee’s index card method, my notes were later transferred to cards. Sometimes these were just one word and others were actually rough storyboard sketches of a particular scene. The index cards allow you to reorder scenes at will as you build your story.
Choose a color palette. A basic understanding of color theory, colors associative mood, and complimenting colors (i.e., color wheel) is very helpful. King Saul was wrapped in royal purple and sat on a golden throne with matching crown. The Philistines wore red, their armor and weapons visibly used lest we forget their Spartan-esque helmets. David was “grounded” in more earthy tones.
Clothing. For stop motion, your choice of prefabricated options is limited to scale. GI Joe and Barbie clothes can be expensive; especially, for period films. Given the lack of ancient, biblical options, we made our own. You will need access to a sewing machine and will need to buy material and thread. Thrift stores often offer less expensive material than craft stores. I am pro-sewing over the use of fabric glues to hold material together. I have yet to find an adhesive that doesn’t require multiple applications or doesn’t leave dark splotches.
Set Design. Our two previous short films, Klept F.O., and Grease Ghoul, both had elaborate sets for beginner filmmakers. That is a recurring stylistic theme for Veteran Film Productions. As such, we spent a lot of time shopping at building supply, craft and thrift stores to help sell the image.
Sky: Patterned (sky blue) paper rolls and an acrylic 20x16 inch self-painted backdrop.
Vegetation: A combination of floral supplies (brush, plastic vines), toy palm trees and model train terrain (trees, brush, grass mats, pond, sand).
Props: Miniature, doll-house items (baskets, silverware, food, harp); poseable and non-poseable toy animals; homemade (Sculpey-baked) and hand-painted weapons; popsicle stick tent frames.
Castle: Backsplash tile for walls, floor tiling, copper-Esque wall paneling, plastic cake columns with spray paint texture for pillars, a Styrofoam bricks entryway, and half-wall.
Stock images/video: Where necessary, stock images and videos were modified with NewBlueFX Cartoonr plugin and added as establishing shots, backdrops or for actions that were not practical for (i.e., too advanced for us) stop-motion.
Characters. The full-form characters you see on screen are twisted, aluminum wire armatures secured with epoxy putty and covered with baked, Super Sculpey clay topped with Morezmore doll hair. You can see production images of our characters on our FilmFreeway page. A full-form character had clothing and accessories, but we also created more detailed faces for close-ups and two-shots. I also had baked some “clean” faces that had the same shape, hair; however, they lack eyes, eyebrows or a mouth. If making duplicate characters, my recommendation is to do one character at a time to ensure consistency across features. Complete one and use it as a template while trying to match wrinkles, hair, etc. The best resource I can point you to for armature creation is https://www.animateclay.com/. I had tried Sam Winston’s armature course and it wasn’t practical for my purposes.
You can check out a few of these sets in our short’s movie trailer. In our next post, we will examine casting voice over actors.