Gromit Unleashed

From my previous post you would have seen my Gromit Design. This was then created and auctioned off in Bristol for £15,000. This has been an amazing experience and I'm over the moon with it. I hope you like.

Gromit Unleashed Design

In May I did a design for the Gromit Unleashed and it's going to be produced. Sadly I forgot to scan my final painting but this photoshop file is more or less the same, depicting my favourite place, lytham.

Animation Effects

Another technical effect was the car crashing. Before working on this animation I did a short sample with the crash and used red Plastercine to hold up the car wile it rolled. The same technique was used for the final animation. The plastercine will be edited out in After effects.

Sample Crash

Final Crash

One of the shots I did was tracking shot of the car driving along. Normally a dolly is used, but because this was on a curved road I had to make my own contraption for the camera.

I tried putting marks down, but when I looked at the shot the car was good but the background was jumping around all over the place. Then I tried using a curved train track but because the lens was so heavy the camera kept tipping over. In the end I got a strip of plastic that lined up with the edge of the road, which is shown below.

Helicopter Animation

When animating in stop frame things like flying are much more difficult than any other animation. So I knew the helicopter would be the most challenging. So in the end I animated on a Blue screen and will edit it in later.

At first a set up the green screen. But I did a quick test and realised that when I got rid of the green, some of the yellow went as well. So I tried blue fabric instead which didn't effect the helicopter.

I originally wanted to use a wire rip from above. But the helicopter kept swinging and would have ended up jumping all over the place. Luckily there was a hole underneath and I used a coat hanger to hold it in the air.

Animating the helicopter flying on the spot was easy, landing it was much tricker. The thick wire was sturdy but it wasn't easy to bend. So after trying different things I found a lamp which had bendable mechanism and painted it blue to blend in with the background. I was very happy with the animation.

Animation Process

This is the first time I've animated on the floor, as I'm use to using big puppets on tables. So this caused some new challenges, which involved the characters, camera and my position.

The first challenge was the characters. They are very small and had habits of falling over. Because the characters didn't have bendable parts I decided to do a more comical walk, making the characters shuffle, which worked really well. This technique was used with the sheep as well.

The other challenge was working on the floor. I normally use a full size tripod, but had to use a tiny tripod or even just popping the camera on the floor.

The Making

Some of the things in the scene had to be made, but resemble what a 6 year old would make. I made the school and Hospital from a cardboard box. In Toy Story at the very beginning there is a town scene and the buildings there were made from boxes.

I used crayons to give it colour and paper straws for the windows.

Another thing I made was the stretcher. I used toothpicks for the poles, and glued fabric and card together to form the base. This was a bit tricky whilst animating because I had to glue gun the handles to the medics hands. In the end this worked out.

Studio

I used my bedroom as the animation studio, as I needed floorboards and a cream/white background.

Storyboard

Set

The road was made from black card with white crayon lines.

I created a child like room with items of clothes, teddies, crayons, marbles and building blocks. Three of the teddies were donated by the North West Air ambulance, which have their logo on.