Out of Your Head
The ‘Out of Your Head’ project gave us the opportunity to work with our peers and create a collaborative film based on a five word prompt. Overall this project allowed me to try my hand at different aspects of production. We chose to do a stop motion film, which required significant pre and post production. We worked in a group of three, which meant we brought a broad range of perspectives to the project from the outset.
We started by choosing five words from the word cloud, which then narrowed down to one: Forest. The image of a ‘forest’ evoked ideas of folk lore and fey mythology. The members of our group had a shared interest in telling a dark fairytale, so we went forward planning a story with that theme in mind.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ciTjo2wKpg3T8QdN-A7fwHAgh7suwG63C1bfhN4ELLg/edit?usp=sharing
We all wanted to try an animation medium, that we had not tried before. Stop motion animation fit this goal. As a medium, it has become commonly used for darker animated features, like Henry Sellick’s ‘Coraline’ and ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’. Our story hinged on the concept of fairy food. As fairy lore goes, if you east fairy food your fate is sealed and you will either be spirited away or claimed by the fairies. We decided to use actual food, something which stop motion would allow us to do, in order to emphasise this in the story.
The narrative of our story emerged as we developed this concept.
Our story board shows the first part of our story (before we had finalised the ending.) A poor boy is lured from London, by fairy magic, into a magical forest. In this forest he meets a tall fairy who offers him fairy food in the form of a cake. Unable to resist, the boy eats the food and thus seals his fate. The ending is ambiguous. We posit two endings: the fairy devours the boy, or the boy becomes a fairy in a very gruesome way. By tearing off his flesh.
We began our pre-production by dividing the workload between the three of us. One of us made the models, there other two built the set pieces. I took on designing the cityscape. Each piece was designed as a flat plane, which was then mounted on black card. We shot the film over two days, using a dark room with a black background to keep the lighting consistent.
Post production was also divided in to three aspects: editing, sound design and animation. We decided to include a lavender hued magic for the fairy, which I animated using straight ahead animation. The facial expressions were also created by drawing straight ahead over the frames. This way we were able to save time while filming without sacrificing storytelling.
We set out to tell an ambitious story. In reflection, our story would have been better suited to a longer format. If we had more time, then I would have included shots and storytelling elements to clearly convey our narrative to the audience. I also thought that some shots did not linger for long enough to establish the most important images in our film.