Shooting the Action
Because of the photographic style I had chosen for my stop motion animation, I needed to shoot the action and movement of my protagonist Red before I could start actually filming on my stop motion set with DragonFrame. Enlisting the help of a musical theatre student (Saskia Steene Faulkner, pictured below) and sourcing a Red Riding Hood cape from Amazon I arranged a day for shooting the primary element of my film.
Saskia Steene Faulkner modeling for Red, alongside the original character design.
After attempting to take still photographs consecutively while directing Saskia in between, I found that the consistency and flow of her movements weren't as natural as I wanted. Instead, I tried walking 'Red' through small sections of the storyboard and then continuously taking photographs with the shutter on my camera as she acted out the scene. This gave a far more natural feel to her actions, and also meant that the consistency and flow of her motion was much more steady. Though this meant the photographs were averaging out as lower than 24fps (the speed my animation itself would be) the realism was far more beneficial to my project, and I was still able to use 24 photographs a second once filming on my stop motion set itself.
Having Saskia was also an advantage since her experience in both musical theatre, stage performance and music allowed her to exaggerate the emotions and actions I directed her to. This consequently made it a lot easier to understand and sympathise with her character when it came to the stop motion itself, as only little images were used on the set - had she been more subtle with her acting, it might not have been obvious enough to come across in the final product.
I filmed the action sequence in mid-autumn, which meant that the ground was littered with leaves and the trees were starting to go bare. This reflected my initial plan for the background, and I was able to recreate the setting effectively on my stop motion set [see below]. Furthermore, the vibrancy of the red cape stood out very well from the green and brown of the forest, especially in running scenes, and therefore I was able to fulfil my idea of using a bright colour to set Red apart from her surroundings and tell the audience she was the protagonist very quickly.
Below is a condensed version of the action and the accompanying photographs I eventually used:
Red walks through the forest and finds an axe, which she cunningly hides in her red cape.
Upon hearing a suspicious sound behind her, she runs to escape danger.
When she stops she is confronted by The Wolf, but she talks her way out of trouble and continues on her journey.
Red greets her Grandmother, but it is too late when she realises The Wolf's trickery.
Red wakes up in The Wolf's belly but remembers the axe and resourcefully escapes.
Red's Photographic Frames
Over 2000 photographs were taken on the day of shooting the action, and since I had planned to print and cut out frames individually to then place as characters on my set, this was far too many to manage. To decrease the amount of frames I first of all deleted any outtakes or unnecessary frames (e.g. photographs where Saskia was looking at the camera and/or repeated actions that were longer than needed). However, I still had far too many frames, and so I turned back to my storyboard and decided to cut out certain actions that weren't important. For example, the section where Red kneels beside some flowers for a few seconds before running from The Wolf; this ultimately didn't add anything to my overall project and so I decided against using it. (Sections such as the silhouettes of The Wolf eating the Grandmother behind Red's walking figure I decided to take out because it was too difficult for me to recreate to the standard I wanted in the time frame I had.)
A pile of photographic frames to cut out and number, alongside myself cutting out the frames by hand.
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| Myself and another student preparing for our animations. |
The Wolf
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| My second batch of wolf figures. |
However, when testing these silhouettes on the first day of filming on my set, I realised that the shape was blurred and hard to position without also accidentally putting the card figure in the camera's frame. Due to the fact I had to balance my light source on top of the camera lens [see below] because of the limited facilities available, it meant that the space for me to fit my figure to project onto the set was far too small to work. Instead, I decided to use a blurred head of The Wolf for the initial meeting in the film, and then created a second batch of wolves in a smaller size to use on the set itself in the penultimate and final scenes. This then produced another problem when it came to showing the ears, eyes and teeth of The Wolf to accompany the narration (which I had initially planned to cut out of the figures and therefore allow light through the silhouettes in the projection). Instead, I decided to draw these features on with a silver pen, and this proved to work just as well as my first idea.
The Set
The base of my set was a 'Lazy Susan' eating platter that rotated around an axis around the middle; in my set design I had developed the idea for a rotating set in order to make the movement in my film considerably easier. I then covered the entire surface with brown plasticine in order to create a base where my photographic frames would be able to stand up by themselves while I photographed the frame. Furthermore, this made resuming the filming at the start of lesson quicker as the photographic frames left indents in the plasticine which I could track to the last frame. The trees were handpicked twigs from the same forest I had filmed 'Red' in.
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| My set-up for filming, with my set ready to rotate with Red. |
On beginning to film there were several problems I had to solve. Firstly, my set looked very sparse as I was only able to support around ten twigs on the the set that would stay in place throughout filming, and I realised that what I thought would be the projected silhouette of The Wolf would not be visible as there was not a flat enough surface for it to be seen on. To resolve this, I added a cylinder of black paper into the middle of my set so that the shadows were visible, and this also gave me a more manageable depth to frame when filming. I also had issues with the lighting, and so decided to film under one of the tables to avoid interference from other students' lights (and also the different light levels at the various times of the day we had opportunities to film in): since lighting and shadow was such a key part of my idea I brought in my own torch and positioned it in a place which I could easily recreate between lessons.
