Me and my colleague at Common Folk started work on a new stop motion animation today for Forth Valley Rape Crisis Centre. The project revolves around a spoken word poem by Katya Mansell (The Violent Kind) and a variety of musicians across Scotland. I wanted to share some of the progress, the way we build our ideas and how it all moves forward. Think of this as a production diary :)
(Finished whiteboard composition which is a still. The animation shows each stem growing and expanding. See below).
The idea is to have a seedling progress through life and battle against the forces of nature, the poem represents that hurdle anyone faces when reaching out for help, the matter of simply asking in the first place.
(The initial drawing. We shot about 48 frames of the whiteboard, gradually erasing small parts of the roots till we were left with a blank white space).
We wanted to find an organic way to grow the roots of the seedling. The plant when it grows will be built from Plasticine. We choose to go down the whiteboard marker route and with a simple invert we have roots. This is just a 1 hour test. The final animation will see the roots start to form recognisable shapes which come and go with the lyrics of the track.
Cheers, Cotton
Wow. Beautifully animated. The growth is very smooth. I'm going to share this on the FIlmmaker's Community page. Come on by sometime and join up! I'm sure our little community here would love to keep up on your progress!