a lost toys journey complete animation

dope sheet

character sketches

storyboard

Chicken run figures

The first two and a half year of the production of chicken run was spent designing the characters and doing the storyboard. When they finally did the shoot the film, it took 18 months. When they started, it was just peter lord and nick park writing away in a quiet room and by the end of pre-production, they were working with a crew of about 250 people. This turned out to be a massive effort to get finished.

The heads of the chicken characters and their hands were made of plasticine. Plasticine is the classic animation material that they had used for 30 years. The chickens' bodies are made of other materials that were mean to look like plasticine. Originally, they were all sculpted in plasticine from which moulds were taken and then they were made into silicone rubber. Inside they had strong steel skeletons. They used silicone rather than plasticine because they wanted further detail and they wanted to use paint effects and they realised you can't paint plasticine effectively. Things would get smudged.

Mood Board

Proposal

Proposal

My idea is to have a story about a toy being lost out in his owner’s garden. On his adventure, he meets a little mud creature. He watches as the mud creature’s house and an entire town builds itself around him. But as the toys owner approaches, the town disassembles himself and the mud creature retreats. The owners hand comes on to the screen, picks the toy up and takes him away.

I will be using 12 frames per second in this animation. Although in the part where the two builds itself, I may use a lot more frames in a second so you can see the town being built bit by bit in detail. I will be making the set myself. This is the set design.

 The video will be most likely be posted on youtube as he production is not big enough to make it on to tv or anything like that. Youtube is a good place to post short stop motion animaton clips. Many people use youtube to show their animation work. I have previously made stop motion videos and then posted them to youtube and people seemed to enjoy it.

My target audience would be children aged 6-12. They would be children who are usually quite adventurous in terms of playing in the garden a lot rather then playing games all the time. It would be for any ethnicity. In terms of gender, it would be for male and female although the young male audience may enjoy it more what with the magnet creations which is a product targeted at young males as they enjoy building things where as the young female audience would not usually be into that sort of thing.

Real fur on the Fantastic Mr Fox Puppets

The puppets makers of Fantastic Mr Fox were concerned when the director said he wants to use real fur (which has a tendency to twitch) rather than sculpted fur (which is what most stop motion animated films use) on the animal characters in the film. But Wes Anderson insisted after seeing real fur on puppets in Ladislas Starewich’s 1930 stop-motion classic. In the end, the animal’s fur was made from dyed goat’s hair and dyed hair plucked off of toys. The Hair of the human characters was taken from the hair of people around the studio. The animal’s hair was said to give a nice rippling effect, what with it being real.

Fantastic Mr Fox Puppets

Once Wes Anderson had decide that he wanted the next film he directed to be a stop motion animation, he called some of the best puppet makers in the world. Ian MacKinnon and Peter Saunders (the puppet makers) had taken part in making many stop motion films and commercials together such as Chicken Run, Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride, and Henry Selick’s Coraline.

Although they had plenty of experience, they found what Anderson was asking for was quite the “challenge”. Because Anderson had no experience in stop motion, it pushed the puppet makers out of their “comfort zone”. They had to try “new ideas, new technique and new materials.”

MacKinnon and Saunders based the puppets off of extremely detailed drawings by Félicie Haymoz, a young Belgian character designer. Anderson told the young designer that Mr. Fox needed to be a combination of Roald Dahl, Rex Harrison, George Clooney and “a stuffed fox". Haymoz had said that in some cases, it took a long time to arrive at a drawing that Anderson was happy with. In the case of the rat character, Anderson liked the first draft and stuck with it. But in other cases, like with the case of the character peter, at one point he was happy with everything except his glasses and so Haymoz had to spend more time working on just the glasses. In the end, Haymoz made about 15 drawings for each of the 40 characters.