Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Make: Believe // Athena Studios’ Auntie Claus Stop-Motion Project”.
Hi, i’m bryce parker, i’m one of the producers on the anti-climax project, along with john peters, i’m working with the production schedule right now, bringing in artists working out our delivery deadlines for our animation, trailer and working on story concept. Work here at the studio to engage our pitch package. We were looking for a property that we could adapt and turn into a great feature film project, and we came across anti-clause, which is a family favorite of ours. Um john and i both have kids, who are teenagers. Now we’ve grown up with this book for the last 10 years and we knew right off the bat that this was going to be a great property for us, because it had fantastic illustrations. A really great moral lesson in it and the story itself just led itself to stop motion animation.
So we contacted the author got in touch with her agent, went through the process of acquiring the rights of the book and had a great experience with her. She was really jazzed about us taking on her book as an animation project. She always sort of saw auntie claus being animated and was really helpful with us in the process of working out the character, designs and some of the story points. So the pitch itself is going to be a one and a half minute animation test where we’ve taken the lead character from the story. Her name is sophie she’s an 11 year old and we’re modeling her out as a fully articulated stop-motion puppet and we’re building an elevator set for one of the key moments in the book, which is where she’s whisked off to the north pole on her aunt’s magic.
Elevator and the animation test will have her actually walking into the elevator, not sure what buttons to press to follow. Her aunt to the north pole, having a moment of hesitation as she’s, getting her bearings and then just through process of elimination hitting the right combination of buttons, throwing a handle and shooting the elevator off into orbit to travel. To the north pole. We could probably even just get in with fine brush right. We opened this. We might not even need to lose the floor, so here you can see sophie, and this is the actual hero puppet over here. The hair was done by suzanne moulton, who did the hair for coraline. You know once we’ve sort of agreed on what the look and feel is in sort of 2d. Then we want to go into 3d because it really changes when you get it in light and you can start spinning it around and so we’re going from the 2d to the 3d. And then we go into the computer.
We go into maya and then we rp it and from there we cast and mold every word requires several face replacements just to get a word out now. The mouth is, one piece, that’s printed, and then somebody had to go in and actually paint the tongue and then the teeth have several coats of paints, including a gloss coat at the end. Your eyebrows are really raised up and then you’ve got these where they’re really down so you’ve got these types of things, and you just you know you can’t really put those kinds of looks together at all. So one of our goals with this production is to keep everything centered the bay area.
There is a huge talent pool of folks from um who’ve worked in stop motion for leica, mckinnon, saunders, industrial light and magic who are well versed in live action, visual effects and stop-motion. They want to form a studio here that can bring those people and keep them employed long term. We have a lot of other projects we want to explore after anti-clause and the idea is to have a studio where we can have artists come in and roll from. One show to the next: my name is jeannette vera and i am a 3d modeler, a concept, artist, editor, compositor and clean up. I clean up the eyelids or the eyes if they have any scratches on them. This one on the left is clean, except for the very last frame it’s kind of dirty still, and this one is completely dirty the eyes.
The clay is like really dirty, and especially around the eyes. My name is tom, prost and i’m art directing this project. For athena, we wanted this kind of mahogany. Look.
We used uh what what’s called luon eighth inch mahogany plywood, and we then we just applied a stain to it. What was to look like an etched glass which was actually described, the the acrylic the floor has got, which is supposed to be red carpeting with the gold frame or border. The interior also has laser cut uh reflective brass panels. Hi my name is victoria rose.
I’M a feature film puppet maker. This is my workspace. The way that i have it set up is into two tables. This table is my mold making and casting table back chamber and pressure pot down here. This is my puppet steaming and painting slash everything area, based on other experiences that i’ve had. I found that in stop motion specifically as well as in other fields like baking.
For example, you need to be very patient and careful with your product, because the the faster you try to go and the more shortcuts you try to take the more problems you’re going to have. If you go slow and steady and consistent, that’s the best way to do stop motion. We wanted her to you, know kind of look new york sophisticated but still have the essence of girliness it’s kind of drunk. Doesn’T she i made her, i kind of made her look drunk on purpose.
I picked those eyeblinks because she was all like what up man trunks yeah, you .