For this project we have been asked to look at Digbeth, and especially the area around the River Rea. I went down to have a look with my group and found that the area which most interested me was the Custard Factory area. I immediately began thinking about how these small businesses were not the main attraction when the majority of people come to Birmingham, and from there thought of making a TV advert for Custard Factory.
Custard Factory
Shop Logos within the Custard factory
My story board consisted of a drawn New custard factory bag, breaking out of an old birds custard factory tin and from there the colorful buildings and artworks rise up and fit together. But,when i brought this story board back to my group, i was told that they preferred to have a much more real approach to the video.
Here are some videos to show the type of footage we want the final 3 minute documentary to look like:
Why make an armature when one is already available. Simply cutting off the action-man figures face and using epoxy putty to reconstruct the facial features with beads for eyes that i can move around.
Reconstructing the hands for movement!
Origional hand
Cut off fingers and thumb
File down to only palm
Measure size of fingures
Construct fingers and thumb with epoxy putty and twisted wire
Visited the Barbican gallery with Ellen,(http://elmosketches.blogspot.com/) on 25th August, and saw some realy cool stuff. they had all the famous animations in history playing and we walked through watching one after the other. I saw a few stop motion animations aswell including the great pioneer Willis O'brian, whos early work, 'The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy' was being played. The film is a 1917 American silent animated comedy that premiered in 1915, and is one of O'Brien's only wholly animated films.
They had a replica armature of O'brians 1933 King Kong figure, along side a Skeliton armature from Ray Harryhausens' 1963 Columbia Pictures fantasy feature film 'Jason and the Argonauts'.
Not sure where which aniamtion these replacemnt heads are from :/
I saw a fantistic animation that i havent seen before. 'The Tale of the Fox' is a French stop-motion animation by, pioneer, Ladislas Starevich. Its was his first fully animated feature film, based on the tales of Renard the Fox. Although the animation was finished in Paris after an 18-month period (1929-1930), there were major problems with adding a soundtrack to the film. Eventually, funding was given for a German soundtrack by the Nazi regime (Goethe had written a classic version of the Renard legend) and this version had its premiere in Berlin in April 1937. The film was released eight months before Disney's Snow White, it is the world's sixth-ever animated feature film, and the second to use puppet animation.
I also saw the puppets which would have been used for this aniamtion but was unfortuantely let down by the rubbish quality of my phone camera, i never take my SLR to a museum because its much easier to get away with a phone camera, i did have a Soney Ericsson W995 which has an amazing 8mp camera, but my rubbish up grade gave me a 3mp camea on a Sony Erricsson Xperia x8. Part of me wants to go back and take the photos again on my old phone. never the less, amazing armatures with incredible detail.
This was an amazing thing to just stop and look at for a good 15 mins, its very rare that you get to see a prefeshionals work like this. This is the Were-Rabbit armature replica from DreamWorks Animation and Aardman Animations, first feature-length Wallace and Gromit film, 'Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' 2005. Realy annoyed that the photographs came out so dark!
Also visited Tate Modern
There was some preety cool stuff, alot of it is kept in for quiet a while so I've seen it before. Thought these red stairs were preety well done, made entirely out of netting and wire, looks kind of like x-raying a house :D.
