Out Of Your Head project

Beginning discussions and ideas:

This project is a group one I’m working on with Emma Crampton Thomas and Nara Gomes (whose preferred name is Sy, so they will be called that from now on). Immediately, we set up a google doc so we could work together remotely and have access to documents together at all times. Straight away this got the issue of travel and distance off the table, which was extremely significant as Emma lives in Cambridge.

We had all discussed what sort of film to make right off the bat, and landed on stop motion. None of us have ever done this before, so we’re leaving a lot of time to work out problems and experiment. In addition, we wrote the brief at deadline at the top of our google document so we all have easy access to it.

We had to choose a word to focus on from the ‘word cloud’ provided by the tutors. ‘Forest’ captured our attention so we chose it as the main word after considering ‘moon, linger, swamp, poison, devour, drown, illuminate, shadow, and clay’. Since so many words caught out attention, we decided to try to bring elements from many words into our film while still keeping our overall attention on the forest.

We also listed some possible motifs to include: breath, eating, raw meat, decay (moss), mushrooms (fairy rings), we eat mushrooms and when we dies mushrooms eat us, mushroom hunting banquet, Celtic fairy dining hall under mushroom circles, fairy mushrooms, evil fairies, fae/fairy.

Next, we listed some references:

Collecting references and planning right from the start was extremely successful, as it allowed us to brainstorm easily and get the core idea and aesthetic of our animation settled, which left more time for the pre-production.

If I were to do this stage again, I’d collect simpler references. Looking back, I think we were all too ambitious with this project and would have to later edit down our ideas for the script because of this. One thing that did go well, though, was the overall unsettling aesthetic that these references helped build.

We also wanted to reference colour theory, choosing purple as the colour of magic as it usually symbolises this, and I already had purple doll hair to add to the fairy.

In addition, we also wanted to reference colour theory. We knew we wanted the fairy’s colour palette to match that of the primary magic colour, so we were limited by the supplies we had. Doll hair is hard to get in the UK, and expensive, with long shipping times due to the current shipping situation. Therefore we had to stick with white, pink, purple, or light green. Purple worked perfectly as it already symbolises magic and riches in colour theory, so it was an easy decision to go with that.

Story and script ideas:

At first we had brainstormed a story revolving around the changeling myth- where a baby would be stolen by fairies and replaced with a changeling baby. This myth is almost definitely the way people a few hundred years ago explained autism, as in babies symptoms appear quite suddenly rather than over time, causing people to believe their ‘normal’ baby had been switched with a ‘strange’ one. Emma, Sy, and I are all autistic so we were drawn to this, but decided not to go with this storyline for this particular film. Having only 20 seconds to tell a story about such a sensitive and important topic in an age where autistic people still suffer from a great deal of bullying and discrimination, while also wanting to tell a horror story, would be too challenging and we could have risked portraying autistic people in a bad way. Therefore we decided to cut this element out, and instead go with another classic fairy story- one of a child being lured into the fairy realm, eating their food, then being trapped and eaten in turn by the fairies.

After making this initial story idea, we moved onto making a ‘script’. Personally I find actual, properly formatted scripts difficult to understand, since I like to put possible camera angles and other details in with the writing rather than thinking about all that afterwards. Therefore, we wrote our own sort of script.

Another possible script from our google doc

After writing, I knew we had to cut this down. It was a challenge to not get carried away and overexcited about our idea, so I made a very simple second version amending and simplifying our script.

In all, I think our script writing was pretty successful. Writing this all together was great for our collaboration and for making sure everyone had a hand in this early stage of making our film. Looking back, it would have been a good idea to pitch this to another person, perhaps a tutor, so they could give us feedback and let us know that this would be very hard to show in 20 seconds. We did eventually realise this as we continued working, but I feel that our film would have been more successful if we had cut down the number of scenes dramatically.

Pre production plans:

The animatic:

We managed to make most of the animatic before having some significant difficulties- Emma and Sy both unfortunately got COVID, and I had already established I couldn’t draw much due to my RSI. Therefore, after we’d done this we didn’t have as much time left to create our sets and models. Because of this we decided to start on the character and set designs rather than continue with our animatic since we all knew the general idea of where the film was going from the last animatic shot.

Set and model designs

I did some tree designs, which didn’t end up in the final film, referenced from the ‘Don’t Starve’ videogame by Klei. Emma created some colour palettes which we also ended up changing, making our film much brighter to allow our viewer to understand why the boy would want to enter the forest as it seems like a magical and beautiful place.

I made some plans for the appearance of the set and models, which were simple enough for us all to have creative freedom when making each piece. I’m happy with how these went, and they gave us all a solid foundation to begin our work and collect our thoughts.

Emma made some character designs for the boy and fairy, and the main thing I took from these immediately was the strong, unique head shapes. I knew making the models would be difficult and that with my limited experience they wouldn’t reflect Emma’s designs exactly, but I wanted to do my absolute best to get the head shapes right.

I made the model heads out of clay, and I think they were very successful! I think I managed to create the strong silhouettes Emma was aiming for in their concept art, as well as make them look good and charming in a home made sort of way. However, I didn’t know that when working with clay you should always make an armature with a foil or wire ‘anchor’ first, then put the clay over the top to make sure it sticks. This was a huge error, and caused me so many issues and extra hours of work when I made the bodies.

I knew the bodies would be covered by their clothes, so I used simple spheres to try to make flexible bodies.

Final Film – with title card

Final film – without title card

Final Reflection

This is the same writing that is on my final production principles PDF

Collaborating with Sy and Emma was a great, productive experience. We immediately came up with a plan to tackle making our first 24FPS film that focussed on playing to our individual strengths as well as all contributing equally. Right off the bat we decided to do stop motion, something we’d all wanted to try but hadn’t had the chance to yet, so we could do something we hadn’t done before. In addition, this was easier on my elbow RSI which I am very slowly but surely recovering from. We evenly divided the workload and assigned one of us to make the models, another the city backgrounds, and another the forest backgrounds with all of us doing many smaller tasks to make sure there were no outstanding pieces. Overall, I found collaborating easy as we all agreed to be proactive and work hard to achieve a film we could be proud of.

Because of our effective collaboration and agreement to all work our hardest, our animation and preproduction went as smoothly as it could have done in regards to working together. However, working on stop motion without any experience was a challenge. One major issue I had was while making the models- having not worked with clay armatures before, I had no idea that you were supposed to mould the clay around the wire. Because of this, I made all the clay pieces then spend many frustrating hours trying to find ways to retroactively attach them to the wire. It worked out eventually, but the models were not as flexible or stable as they needed to be. In the end, we had to strategically pose the models and use stands for them while filming since they didn’t have the attributes to stand and pose on their own. Although this was a huge challenge, we managed to overcome it and film effectively in the end.

Our concept was quite ambitious, and we had to spend a lot of time scaling it down to create an effective story in only 20 seconds. We wanted to tell the story of a poor child being lured into the forest by fairies and then eaten after eating their food- which, in many tales, traps you in the fairy realm. Even though it’s fairly simple, that’s still a lot to tell in such a short amount of time, and it was a huge challenge to fit everything in. If I was to do this again, I’d suggest beginning with the boy about to eat the cake then include a few subliminal shots of the boy in London, then walking into the forest, to show how he got there instead. However, in the end this concept allowed us to make a successful and interesting film.

Overall I had a great experience working on this film with my group, but can see several areas for improvement. In particular, I think we needed to spend more time on character designs and creating plans for the clay models, which would have cut down the difficulty I had sculpting them significantly. In addition to this, brainstorming each shot in more detail to see what moments to draw out and what ones to skip could have been useful, especially since the film length is so short for a story like this. However, I had a great deal of fun working with this team and on this project, and learnt a lot about delegating, effective ways to plan for a group where everyone has vastly different schedules, and accepting and giving effective constructive criticism. In the end, the final product came out much better than I was expecting! I was worried my models would look clunky and unprofessional on film, but after seeing all the scenes together I was genuinely very happy with the progress I’d made and how well each of the elements we had all created worked together. In particular, I think the transition between the city and forest looks really good, which is great since it took so long so film. I’m also happy with the variety of interesting shots and camera angles that made it into the final film, since they help highlight the emotion of each scene. I do feel we could have definitely improved upon the overall timings though, since certain scenes like the ending could have benefitted from more screentime