Frankenstein

Scenes I animated Victoria In unedited versions

This is the beginning scene in which i animated Victoria again and this time i feel it worked well. although it moves way to fast and so we will have to slow it down when editing it still works because the whole idea of this scene was to get Victoria to look as though she was pulling the rag over Frankenstein and i think that we managed to do this effectively.

End Scene Unedited

This is one of the scenes i animated Victoria in and i am very pleased with how this turned out. i feel that the walk/ running scene worked really well . One reason i think it worked so well is because i made the dress so long that you didn't really need to see the legs moving in the correct position and so this made it easier to animate.

i really like the lighting in this scene because when the door opens light pours into the room which is realistic and so i think this helps create a realistic atmosphere.

Scared Reference

When i found out that i was going to be animating Victoria in a scene in which she is scared/shocked because of the sight of Frankenstein and so i decided the only way in which i could do this scene effectively would be to act out being shocked my self and incorporate this into the animation/scene

The Cat

This is the cat scene in which we had to have 4 separate legs on wires to make the cat walk and then swap it to the full cat armature/model when it cut to a full shot of the cat next to victoria.

Tests

This was one of the tests we did we weren't really trying to film anything in particular we were just seeing how the character looked within our final set. we also thought it may work as a teaser trailer for our animation or as a close up shot of Victorias face.

Prop and Set designs

Final Set Design

These are the final set designs for the lab scene. I am quite proud of the final designs because i think that we have kept to the victorian theme/ style of set that we were working for. i feel that the fireplace and photo frames worked very well because it is a little piece form everyone and it incorporates everyones original style into the set.

Canteen Props

These are the benches i made for the canteen scene. we had many problems with these benches because i didnt make them stable enough and so we had to superglue them in the end because the tape didnt work. to make the benches look as though they were made of wooden planks i used corrugated cardboard which worked well to create this effect. i added tin foil to the pots and pans to create a metal effect.

Other Props

These are the before and after of the other props i made within the set.

These were just other little props that i made to add into the scene. i think they worked well as additional props and the color scheme works well with the walls and the rest of the props within the set.

Chair

The chair was quite difficult to make because the wire and mod-rock did not want to stick together and so it was hard to do but once it stuck it did work really well because it meant that the chair could stand without being propped up against anything.

Desk

This is a desk that i made i again looked at shelves to help influence my designs but i had to research into victorian style as well so that it was in keeping to the rest of the set and style of the story.

Bookcase

This is my bookcase i designed i looked at real shelving first and then drew my design. After this i cut out a template and put it together. i then mod-rocked it and painted it in a dark brown because it is appropriate to the victorian style of furniture.

Tree

This is the tree i made. I looked at really trees and based my design on trees with no leaves because they look creepier than trees with leaves.

We used shades of blue to paint the tree because we wanted to keep it linked to the backdrop which was also painted in different shades of blue and green in a nightmare before christmas style.

Final Frankenstein

This is the final version of Frankenstein. He was strange and unique which is exactly what we wanted within the design. Although he looked good we has a lot of problems when it came to animating due to the size of the model and how thin he was. At one point we even had him on strings to help him walk but this didnt work very well and so we just filmed his legs walking instead of his whole body.

Cat Designs

This is the final design for the cat. Although it looked good we did have a problem when it came to animating because the armature was too stiff and so we had to create 4 separate legs on wires for the walking scenes.

Final Victoria Design

These are the final designs for Victoria. I didn't create the model because it wasn't my job but i did create the final costume design. i had to change it from my original idea because the red fabric was too messy and kept sticking to the white plasticine. i also realized that the original design would be really too difficult to animate and so this dress design was better in helping with making the model more flexible.

Armatures for my design

This is the armature for my design of Victoria it is a basic armature consisting of a wire frame and a polystyrene ball for a head. i wrapped the wire around the hoop in the middle for stability and to give it a good structure for the plasticine to stick to.

First Victoria Designs(clothing designs)

We decided that we were going to change the script completely and change the main character from a man to a woman called Victoria.These designs are for the clothes that Victoria will wear. I looked into the clothing that traditional victorian women would have worn and looked into the film Sweeny Todd because the clothing is very typical of Victorian dresses.

For these designs for clothing i had to have a model to base/ make them on and so i made my own version of Victoria. I think the dress works well although the main problem was that the red fabric went everywhere and clung to the model and so i will have to work on this on the proper design.

Tim Burton Designs/helpful ideas

Keeping with the Tim Burton theme i decided to look into the film The Nightmare Before Christmas. One thing i like about this film is the lighting and colour scheme because they use a lot of blues and greys something that we want to experiment with when we are doing our editing. We have decided that the backdrop will be coloured in these blue tones and so if the film has similar colourings to the background then this should work nicely with the animation.

Vincent short: possible ideas/style of Victor/Victoria

We looked at Tim Burtons short film called Vincent. i decided that this was a great way to look into lighting and the use of black and white design of film which is something we wanted to experiment with during filming. This also has a good use of shadows within the film and we would like to use part of this technique within our own animation to create atmosphere.

Different Frankenstein Designs

These are all versions of Frankenstein. They are all nearly in the same style and we know that within our design that we dont want him to look like these traditional designs and be unique.

One thing that may be interesting to experiment with are the scars on the characters face because it is quite creepy and may be interesting to look at. One thing that we want to experiment with is a more skinny Frankenstein rather than a muscly one because that way we have changed the face of Frankenstein and the whole aspect of the story for example in the old versions of the film he is seen as a monster whereas in ours we want to create a more sympathetic side of him.

Different Victor designs

These are all different versions of the character Victor from the films about Frankenstein. There are 4 different versions here the first one is from the comedy film about frankenstein and so he looks slightly more insane than the others but i feel this would be a good way of creating our version of Victor.

the other 3 are very traditional and i think we could use bits of these designs but they are very smart and i dont think this will work very well with the sort of creepy dark image/atmosphere that we want to include within our animation.

Research

Our group decided to choose the script of Frankenstein to base our stop animation project on. The first thing i decided i needed to do before designing characters and sets was to actually research into old and modern Frankenstein films and images so that we could use some of these ideas within our own animation.

Some of these videos are just trailers or short clips that i found useful for the atmosphere and sounds that are present in original Frankenstein films we could use similar techniques in our own animation.

1931 Frankenstein Clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H3dFh6GA-A

This is the 1931 version/clip of Frankenstein. I think this clip is relevant to helping with our design because i really think it shows the Victor character in full emotion and because the scene includes Victor i feel we really need to look into what his character was originally like before we make our own unique version of the character.

While i was looking at this i really liked the fact that it is in black and white and feel this is certainly something we should look into if we want to get the creepy traditional look for our film.