Story finding
These past two weeks have basically been the lead up to the External Pitch and the recovery, we all put a lot of energy into our pitches and were all sort of continually exhausted afterwards, so haven't quite picked up the pace again yet. Before the pitch, though, I continued too faff with my idea, exploring different dog folklores and seeing what I could come up with. Below are pages from my sketchbook playing with Red Riding Hood, Faerie dogs (dogs who guard the border to faerie land) and wolf women.
I've watched a few of the films I mentioned in my last post- Tale of Tales, and The Company of Wolves. I also like the storytelling of Pan's Labyrinth, Labyrinth and The Fall, all weave stories together and intertwine reality with fantasy. I like this magic realism, but I also want to get surrealism across, which Tale of Tales and The Company of Wolves do.
Tale of Tales was as good as I remembered, the visuals are gorgeous and the three threads of the story are all really interesting, dark and beautiful- the first is of a queen who follows a sorcerer's instructions to become with child, but it leads to another boy, a twin of her son, being born to another mother, she forbids her son from seeing his twin despite their pull towards each other as the film goes on. The second is of two old sisters who trick a king into thinking that they are a beautiful young lady. After the king discovers their trickery and throws one of the women out the palace window into the woods below, she is happened upon by a witch who enchants her to be young again. The king then finds her whilst out on a hunt and claims her as his bride instantly, whilst the still-elderly sister is left wondering how to become young herself and how to enter the same elite circle that her sister has. The third story is my favourite, it is of a princess who wants to be free of the walls around her, her father is loving, if a little inattentive, but she has been in the same castle for all her life reading about adventures and romance- so she asks for her father to find her a husband. He agrees, but decides that she should be marriage should be arranged by tournament which goes wrong. He expects that no one will be able to win, so that he can keep his daughter for longer, but an ogre guesses his challenge correctly, and the princess is taken away into an unhappy marriage where she is abused each night. She makes it out with the help of a travelling circus, but the ogre find them again, kills her rescuers, and goes to take her back. She acts like she is happy to climb onto his back and get taken back to his home, but instead slits his throat, returning to her father's castle covered in blood, holding the ogre's head in the fabric of the old dress the king had brought her to be presented in front of her suitors.
I love the cinematography in this film too, the way it emphasises the characters' relationships through composition and the colours used between stories is brilliant. The weaving of different stories made me think of something that Mike mentioned when we were talking about my plot, that I could have Shuck visiting different characters throughout folklore or history - and in another conversation Jared suggested I could do more than one (obviously small) film. It could be that I string a few different stories together with Shuck as the connecting thread.
The Company of Wolves is a film based on one of Angela Carter's short stories in The Bloody Chamber, and I really enjoyed it. I have no idea if I would have understood what was going on if I hadn't read the short story but I thought it was a really fun adaptation. It goes through all the medley of werewolf stories Carter goes through but connects them by them being told to Rosaleen, the main character, by her grandmother, father, or sometimes by her to her mother.
Again, I thought that the visuals of this film were so beautiful, especially the lighting and colours. The practical effects are evidently trying to meet the standard of An American Werewolf in London but with less of a budget but I enjoyed them anyway, it has all the appearances of a gentle fairytale film until someone transforms horrifically into a wolf which is a fun way to do it.
Other than that I haven't purposely watched anything else, I'm wanting to watched Belladonna of Sadness just because it looks pretty crazy and abstract, not tying itself to a plot too strongly, which is something I think Ian learn from. I also want to watch The Green Knight again because it has that similar vibe- abstract narrative and beautiful visuals, but with a folklore/legend base.
Still not landed on anything yet, hoping something will form in the back of my head whilst focus on other things otherwise I'll get into a loop of overthinking about the idea, trying to force thoughts to come and just stressing myself out. I want to let the cogs turn in the background for a little while.
Style
Despite the fact I'm pausing on the story details I'm trying to keep things moving on the factors I am fixed on- so far that's just Shuck. There will be a scrawny black wolf-ish dog in my film. This has meant I've kept on with my little dog head tests, using different wools to play about with how I can shape the face, followed by a test puppet!
The additional heads are just made with other wools, kept in their yarn-form, wrapped around the clay heads I made before. I like my fluffy wool one from the last post most, followed by the green/purple wolf-y head on the far left, the use of green and purple came from the folklore of the faerie dog, whose coat was green to show its magical association. I think it could look even more effective on a longer snouted dog model, but as I wanted to bring a test puppet into my presentation for the external pitch I just went with what I thought would be most successful for now. I like how my test puppet looks for now, the wool I used looks really fluffy and scruffy, but I'd like to keep the silhouette of the body in my concept sketches more present in the final puppet. I also need to really enforce the wire spine, as having never made a quadrupedal puppet before I didn't realise just how heavy everything either side of the back would be and how much it would pull it down.
I made the puppet my usual way, making a wire skeleton enforced with epoxy putty in the solid areas, and sculpted the head with it on this occasion too. I then padded it out with cotton wool and wrapped it in fabric to make it more shaped.I then covered the puppet in wool using the method i used on Elio's mane, and on rag doll hair. To make the legs skinnier I wrapped black thread around the legs, otherwise the wool made them too chunky. I think this worked successfully visually, but I definitely want to play about with it a bit more. I animated him very quickly in a tent set-up just to get to grips with the four legs and had some fun too, although I didn't use feet rigging/tie-downs so the walk is sort of janky.
I like the beginning when he's sniffing the ground and the boil on the 'fur'.
I've also been considering the general style of the film and have been collecting images that inspire me into a photoshop document, making a big mood board from different influences. There's images in here for visual style and images in here that could feel good for plot inspiration too.
There's a mix of illustration, photography, feature film stills and snippets of short pieces of animation. There's a bit of The Company of Wolves for its relationships and colour palettes, a bit of Sleeping Beauty for its brambles and terrible forest, a bit of Uncle Boonmee for its silhouettes and sinister imagery. I found animated excerpts from the documentary, Angela Carter: Of Wolves and Women, which uses a paper cut-out look that I think if beautiful and pairs really well with the subject of fairy tales and storytelling. I'd love to bring some of these visuals into my film somehow- even if it's just working out the movement of the camera through a stop-motion set in a similar way.
The voice-over for these clips really enhances them too, I love the narrator's voice and how she reads the story, it feels like it brings even more depth to the already 3D space on screen. It made me think of having a small piece of spoken introduction at the beginning of my film to set the scene or character up. The second clip has audio from The Company of Wolves' main story, and it opens up the scene so well! It made me think of the opening to the Sky Discworld adaptations that started with a big opener on the Great A'tuin flying through space, then zooming in through the landscape into Ankh-Morpork and the main story. This too has a very powerful narrator who can fully capture the audience, immediately taking them into the story.
Although this one obviously starts pretty dramatically and tonally would be a bit too much with the whole origin myths, I really like how the music melds with the voice-over, and I especially like the way the narrator opens up the story once we're on the Disc itself- stating that stories, sooner or later, are "about blood." The narration then resumes to be lighter, and ends up leading into the film with "And so, it was the night before Hogswatch..." and the music plays a little glockenspiel-like descent before entering the next scene. The film Stardust also opens in a similar way, really pulling in the audience by reading a story as if round the fire, or with a book on their lap, reading a book to a child. It feels warm and welcoming.
The External Pitch
Last Wednesday Dan held a pitch workshop for us all which was really helpful, none of us had really seen any proper pitch examples before so seeing his previous ones were really useful.
[notes and doodles from the workshop]
After that I reworked my presentation, I wanted it to be more concise and hit on more of really important points for the guests at the external, leaving room for any important questions during the q&a. I also wanted to make each slide interesting to look at and have the, convey the tone of the film.
I feel like the pitch went well and I got more feedback on the film itself than I did on the internal pitch. A lot of the questions in the q&a were asking about things I had already decided on but not mentioned in the presentation (e.g. introducing Shuck as scary, not going into the patient's history etc.) which sort of verified that the direction I was going in was okay, but I still feel like the story I made is too obvious and not very me.
Drawing Exercises
Since the pitch we've all been getting back on out feet a bit, but after Wednsday's afternoon screening of My Life as a Courgette (I had forgotten just how beautiful and sad that film is) Calum set up some drawing activities for us all to do which was really fun to do as a group of several year groups. We started with non-dominant hand drawings which was a good way to break the it-has-to-be-good mentality, then we drew without looking at the pages, which made a bit of a messy group of portraits, I actually found it really hard not to look at the page or my hand. We then did portraits where the angle of each other changed every minute or so, which led to a mashed up portrait.
After that we worked from the website Line of Action. You can set up a class on it to go through a series of photos that you have to draw on a timer, like in life drawing. It started on 15 seconds, then 1 minute, then 5 minutes, 10 minutes, then 15. I actually enjoyed the shorter ones most, maybe 1 minute being my favourite. The 15 minute one (the bottom most drawing on the right page) was my least favourite becausee it was a really tricky angle and expression and I had to really spend time on it when I wanted to just move on, but it's a good exercise to get better at it.
After this I explored the site more and found their version for animal classes, and got myself to do a similar exercise but for dogs. I changed it so that each drawing was 1 minute long as I liked just moving through them at a good pace.
I should do one of the timed classes for the dogs as well so I can really get into the anatomy of them, but it was a nice way to spend my time, exploring different dog shapes and poses.
As said I'll be letting my film thoughts continue in the background while I continue with progressing the Shuck design and watch films for inspiration. I'll also be balancing this with my dissertation and music video work (which will be getting another post).
Also some fun news to end the post on! The Film Grad film Sam and I worked on, Nighty Night, Dear by Se Jin Park, was selected as joint winner for the Film & Animation section of the Global Design Graduate Show 2022! Feels great to have worked on it with such great creative people, I posted some of my animation for it on my 10x10x22 post.
Link to GDG Show site:
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