Our Film is Complete!

After months of hard work our film is now complete! We have learnt so much.... from creating storyboards, characters and sets to animating with professional camera equipment. Fantastic! We recently recorded the voice overs and sound effects too which was great fun. Keep checking back to find out when our Premier Screening is.

In The Factory

After a full day of animating the first camera sweep inside the factory is now complete and it looks fantastic! This was one of the busiest scenes so far with lots of things moving including conveyor belts, pistons, dryers, blades, spoons and robotic hands! We can't wait until tomorrow when we will start animating the second camera sweep inside the factory, plus capture close ups from today.

And here's a huge shop we made for the street scene...

Making Machinery

At the same time as animating the farming scenes we are busy making the machinery for the new set. We have made lots of cogs for the conveyor belt as well as dryers, mechanical arms, rolling pins, dough balls and lot, lots more!

 

 And here's our title, made out of cardboard letters!

A New Set...

Now that we have animated the first and last scenes we have changed the set for the farm scene. We now have animals to animate as well as tractors, wheat and windmills! Here are the pigs waiting to be animted!

And this is what our new set looks like!

On the picture below you can see the set on the laptop screen that we are using to animate with.

Animating

We have had another full day of animating today. So far we have animated the first scene and the last scene...still lots to do. It's great fun!!

Music for our film

Today we commissioned a musician to produce a piece of music for our film. We spoke to him over the phone, explained the storyline and described the type of music we would like him to create. We have asked him to use acoustic guitars, violins, flutes and the piano. It was very exciting to speak to him and we can't wait to hear the music he produces!

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 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!