My hand knitted Stop motion animated film

Hi Steemit!

Before I share some current work with you I thought I'd share my first animated film, The Little Red Plane. This film was created using hand knitted/ crocheted sets and environments and was initially aimed at pre school children.

This film follows our main characters (a little boy and his cat) as they fly from place to place, delivering parcels in their little red plane. There is no speech in it as I wanted to create a film with no language barriers.

Please take a look and if you have any young children they may be interested in seeing it also. It's around 3 minutes in length:

A little bit about how it was made.

Characters:

For the little boy I decided to build a steel ball and socket armature to maximise the amount of movement I could get from him. For his head I used a 3D printer to create 14 heads all with slightly different facial expressions. The heads were interchangeable and were replaced regularly throughout the film to give the character a large a range as possible. I decided to go for this as I had seen this method used on Coraline and loved the effect. Now using a 3D printer is commonplace in many of the larger stop motion studios. Because the budget was limited I went with an aluminium wire armature for the cat and crocheted around the frame. Both character's feet had small metal washers glued on to them so that we could fix them in place with strong magnets under the table.

Planes:

We made two planes for the film. The small plane (around 30cm long) was made for the far away shots. This plane had a smaller version of the boy and the cat made and fixed in place. They had limited movement and were only made from the waist up. For the close up shots we created a cockpit where our fully armatured characters sat and could interacted with what was happening around them. I designed the plane from a blueprint of a real plane that I felt suited the look and cut both the small and the large plane out using a laser cutter. I then covered both planes in red felt and stitched around the wooden frames making a kind of 'plane suit'.

Backgrounds:

All sets were pretty much hand knitted. We knitted large patchwork quilts for the ground, moon, sky etc. I was lucky enough to get me Grandma and my mum to help with some of the larger pieces as deadlines were tight.

Music:

The music was created by my friends Ryan Jackson, Mark Taylor, Stuart Brennan and Max Berg in the Christmas holidays when I came back home from university.

Filming techniques, issues and learning experiences:

The first big issue I found was that my sky was drooping when I hung it up. Naively that hadn't occurred to my at the time. We laid all of our sky backgrounds flat and took pictures of them all. We then filmed the rest of the background with with a green screen (red in this case as our backgrounds were largely green) then in post production removed the green screen and replaced it with the large pictures of the knitted sky. For the clouds I took photographs of cotton wool, cut around them in Aftereffects, turned the opacity down and animated them in post production. All shots of the plane with animated using a green screen and the background was placed in after as was anything you see flying or floating (goose, planets, stars etc.)

Aspect ratio:

This pieces was shot in 720 x 576 which is why ot looks square. In my later work I moved on to HD. The reason for this was that at the time the machine I was working on struggled with such large files. As both me and technology progressed I am now shooting everything on HD.

I really regret not documenting the “making of” through photographs and a blog. One of the main reasons I'm creating blogs now is that they are so helpful to look back on. Looking at it now there are some shots I would have filmed differently and some additional techniques I would have thrown in but overall I am very proud of this film as a student piece. This film gave me a way into the industry and worked well as a conversation starter to connect with more established animators. I also got to do a little travelling when it started to get accepted into film festivals.

Further information...

I hope the descriptions I've given are coherent enough to follow. If anyone has any questions about how certain parts were filmed or how anything was made please leave a comment and I'll get back to you with a more in depth answer.

Thanks for reading my ramblings and I'd love to know what you thought of the film.

Charlotte :)