Animation begins!

Today was a great day...we started animating! It was hard work as we had to move more than one thing at once between shots and it was tricky to remember what order to move things in and in which direction! It was great fun though! Today we filmed the first scene where the Spaghetti truck drives along the road passed the scarecrow, the farmer and the crows. We also animated the windmills, the rabbit and the horse!

In between animating we carried on making more characters and props for the next scenes including a mole, a pig and a cow. The mole is going to be animated peering out of the ground, so we had to cut it up into smaller pieces and then put them in the right order, ready for animating!

Testing the camera slider

We have done some test sequences today with the camera slider to test the movement of the camera as well as the movement of the characters. We have to move the camera 5mm each time we take a picture along with moving lots of characters and props on set. It's so exciting!

  

Set complete!

The animation film set is now complete! We have added the finishing touches to the background, including painting the back wall with white paint and rollers which was great fun! Just a few more replacement characters to finish and then we are ready to start animating!

Painting the background with rollers and white paint!

Painting the background with rollers and white paint!

Adding a water wash to the fields

Finishing the replacement horses

More work on the set...

On Friday we had the challenge of making all the replacement characters for the Crow, the Scarecrow, the rabbit and the farmer. It took a while to make them all look the same but we have just about finished them and they look really good. We also did more work on the set and the backgrounds, designing the fields and adding texture to the road. Here are more images of us at work...

Adding a watercolour effect to the fields

More scarecrows!

More Farmers!

Hopping rabbits!

Tractor and Spaghetti Van

The Spaghetti Van

More models have appeared on set...

Our set is getting fuller and fuller and is looking fantastic! We placed some more finished models on set today to check them for size against the other models and they look great! We have lots more work to do before we can start animating but here are a few more images for you to look at...

The Spaghetti Truck in the foreground with a horse in the background

The tractor pulling a trailor

More models...

We have had another busy day today and have made lots more models for our animated film. We have made lots of wheat, crows, rabbits, horses, scarecrows and farmers. We are going to use the "replacement technique" to animate some of our characters and so we have had to make lots of versions of the same character, with one part slightly different. For example, we have made lots of crows with the wings and beaks in different positions so that they can fly and talk. We have also made replacement characters for the farmer and the scarecrow so that they can move their arms and talk too. We had to concentrate when we were doing this so that we made each replacement character look the same. You can see us hard at work below...

Making the replacement scarecrows with arms in different positions

Making the farmers hand so that we can film a close up of him sowing seeds

Painting the replacement crows

Drawing the rabbits

The first replacement rabbit

More characters...wheat, trees, the Spaghetti Tree, scarecrows and crows!

Our Set in the making...

We are in the middle of turning our drawings from our storyboard of The Spaghetti Tree into 3D models. We are then going to make these models move in front of the camera as we bring our script to life through animation. We have lots more models to make but this is what we have created so far...very exciting!!!

The Spaghetti Truck

Different size trees, hills and windmill to create depth

The Windmill and Tractor

The Tractor

A close-up of the Tractor