Production

The production seemed strait forward to me as we started to shoot. I headed in with confidence that we could get it done in the 2 days we had set aside for the shooting and we started off well working on the stop motion component of the film. The idea behind this was that the main character ‘KARL’, a boy who dreams of being a robot, would bring to life inanimate objects in his dream and they would act out his imagination. This seemed like a fun approach to this project and it was something that we all had a little experience of doing. However, we came across some difficulties with lighting and how much time it was taking. The time it takes to move the pieces a tiny amount and then take a picture meant that hours passed by and the lighting changed around us while we were doing it. This led to inconsistent light sometimes. To get around this we cut off most of the ambient light sources and replaced them with lamps. I would have liked to use some commercial lights and have the light reflected round the room to have made more even lighting and shadows however, we did not have access to these so it could not be done. Aside from these small issues we managed to get about half way through the first scene on day one.

This is a video of us working on our stop motion to demonstrate how long it takes. This short clip was originally 46 minutes long and is playing at 64x normal speed

Our second day of production had us finishing off the stop motion. I think we were all a little frustrated by how long it was actually taking us to shoot this and we all knew the whole movie wouldn’t be finished by the end of the day. Soon after starting we had another issue with lighting, as it changed as we moved about the room. We had used some lamps to illuminate the original scene but when we moved to the next shelf up we had huge shadows being cast over the props. By reshuffling some of the lights we were able to fix this and it also gave the scene some sense of a change happening between the 2 location and an almost surreal feeling to the footage. Another small difficulty we encountered during this was the law of gravity. Everything had to fall down. The bullets that flew from the toys gun proved to be extremely stubborn when it came to hanging from the ceiling and being ties in place. With the time flying by we had to come up with a good solution. The thought popped into my head of just swinging the bullets back and forth and this proved to be a small victory as it gave the impression that we were actually moving them.

The second half of the day was spent actually filming the movie. Without a proper time production schedule we had let ourselves be pushed outside the optimal time for shooting the morning scene of the movie. This was more of a lack of experience on our team’s part rather than bad management. As we were working it just felt like time was flying by and the lighting was rapidly changing away from what would be suitable. However we moved ahead as planned and finished off the first scenes shooting.

At this point we were all pretty tired and the production was less than half done. We decided that we had to head into town and shoot the second dream. Our location was in the BCT studio and this would be our only opportunity to have it empty. The second dream consists of ‘KARL’ moving the walls of his dream and making objects move at his command. After this he moves about his reality at super speed. We started off by having him move from the area where he had fallen asleep. Use of a panning medium shot we had him moving into a boxed in area with no exit. By setting up a static shot over his shoulder and having a shot on the ground between his legs we were able to capture all the action that was happening as well as being able to move the objects. We then set up a sequence of motion that we would act out so that Emile could sync up with the flying objects. This took a few tries to get the movement and the objects matching but we managed to get it done.

This was our first attempt.

At the end of 2 days of production we are now about half way done and have put in about 18 hours of work into the film.