During the animation process

The animation process is the most interesting, enthusiastic, and exciting part of the project. It is the core of this process, but also the most difficult and demanding one. We couldn’t wait to reach to that part after all the preparation and pre-production we did. We wanted to see our idea, our story, to come to life. we started with doing tests with the threads in order to get familiar and understand the movement (physics) that we wanted to create. Because of the time pressure we didn’t manage to make as many puppet animation trials as we wanted.

During the animation we were working in twos, one person animating and the other at the computer, helping with direction and taking the shots. The person at the computer was also watching the rhythm/timing/space of animation in order to advise the person who was animating. This was really helpful because very often, after hours of animation it is very difficult to have a clear mind and take the right decisions on animation issues.

Although we were aware that we would defiantly face a lot of problems, when we actually faced them it was really different from what we imagined or expected. Also having time constraints, we had to stay calm, be quick and find smart and functional solutions. For example, one problem that we faced was, the person animating could see the puppet from a certain angle, but because of the camera position, the shot looked really different on screen. In such a case the directions from the person at the computer were crucial. Another problem that we kind of predicted was the puppet breaking. Although, we never expected it to breaking so many places! (head, foot and leg) The solution was to use another incomplete body that we had made as a trial, and add some parts of the old one onto it.

Another thing that we didn’t expect, was that we would have to animate a shot horizontally.

It was the last shot of the film and also the last shot with the puppet. It was impossible to animate the puppet like we had before (vertical position) it was extremely difficult, time consuming and the result wasn’t what we wanted, so we decided that it might be a solution to animated that shot on a glass in an horizontal position.

In the animation process one of the major factors of pressure was time, so after a point we decided that we need to work parallely in two groups in order to finish on time. We choose shots that didn´t require our main set and thus could be animated separately. Then we constructed a second set only with the essentials in order to animate these shots.