'Bear' Update 26/8

This week has been urm, slightly ‘interesting’ shall we say. The week didn’t get off to the best start due to having had a slight skateboarding accident at the weekend which unfortunately resulted in me damaging my animating hand. Luckily it wasn’t broken- I did go and have it X-Rayed as it was quite painful and swollen. So that itself hampered my productivity especially towards the first half of the week. It’s feeling much better now though, thankfully. On top of the injury I also had a really bad bout of insomnia, lasting pretty much a whole week. I think the sound design is making me feel stressed!

How it started

How it's going!

So overall, I can’t say this was the most fun week I’ve ever had, but I can say that picture lock is now pretty much complete- I just have 1 or 2 backgrounds left (depending which route I go down) and the crowd shot to animate- which might take around a day. I think I’ll then go over the film a couple of times to tighten up the edit and make sure it’s all working how it should be.

Despite this week not being the smoothest, I was able to get over a difficult hurdle of a section which wasn’t working. The new way I’ve decided to go about doing it worked out much better, so that feels fantastic to have put that to bed.

I was also given the completed score by my composer Jason Williams, whom I feel has done an absolutely brilliant job. I’ve worked with him for several years now on a number of my films and he always does what I have in mind and then some! The score really enhances the film and it wouldn’t be what it is without it.

Alongside this, I also finally decided what to put behind the car windows when he is driving. I didn’t want to make panoramic backgrounds in a realistic style and then keyframe them, because in my mind I had always wanted them to be sort of abstract. When you’re in a car or train, the scenery sort of whizzes by and it can look fairly abstract anyway, so I wanted to replicate this. It didn’t need to be detailed as it wouldn’t have added to the story. But I didn’t know in exactly what way or how as a few of the abstract ways I tried previously didn’t work. It then came to me- I often work with 16mm film, so I thought ‘well isn’t this quite abstract and also something I like to bring in to my rotoscope work anyway’. There have been numerous test pieces where I’ve used 16mm (or similar) as a background. So it only made sense to incorporate it into ‘Bear’ as well. See below for what I mean:

It wasn’t even like I was shoe-horning it in- it just made sense. Around 2013/14 I made several 16mm painted on/ scratched films, which didn’t actually end up ever being made into anything- they’ve just been sat on my computer ever since and I’ve used snippets of them over the years to enhance other rotoscope projects of mine. So I imported one of them into the project which was something I made on a blue reel of film and printed on my fingerprints with black acrylic paint. It made a really interesting pattern:

I put it behind the car shots and added a gaussian blur, so it doesn’t take the focus away from the character, but definitely adds something visually. As it flickers by, the patches of dark and light change, making it somewhat mirror what you see when travelling in a vehicle. Below is a grab of it in the film:

Right, well I’m going to gorge myself on football over the bank holiday weekend- I’ve got around 9 matches to watch over the 3 days and I am so ready for it! And I’m going to be photographing a few of them too- can’t wait to get back into that again. Hoping for good weather! Have a good 'un xo