Ideas - Fairy Tales (Rumpelstiltskin)

I started coming up with ideas for this project over the summer. I want it to be based on a fairy tale but in a much more darker theme. To start off I took a look at a lot of fairy tales, I looked at Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Little red riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel. 

Rumpelstiltskin

• A Miller has daughter, whom he lied about to their king . He said that she could turn straw into gold. 
• The King then demanded that Miller's daughter had to spin straw into gold within three days. 
• If she was unable to meet the king's demand she would be beheaded. 
• A strange man offered the girl help. But obviously not for free. 
• For the first two nights she offered him her necklace and a ring. But the king was greedy and wanted more gold. 
• She was to become queen if the kings demands were met. 
• The strange man appeared again however the girl had nothing to reward him with. The man simply said that he would spin gold for her if he was able to have her first born once she became queen. 
• A year after she had her first born child as queen, it was a son.
• Obviously the strange man had returned in order to collect his reward. 
• The queen refused to give up her child. The strange man got angry.
• He then gave her three days to guess him name. 
• The queens parents followed the strange man into the woods to find out his name. They discovered what his name was and told the queen.
• The strange man returned again and asked the queen to guess his name and her answer was 'Rumpelstiltskin'. 
• Rumpelstiltskin was so angry. He then vanished in a cloud of smoke. 
• The queens father promised to never boast about her again. 

After looking into the plot of Rumpelstiltskin, I felt it was a little too far fetched as I would like to bring the story into a more modern setting and make the story a little more believable and Rumpelstiltskin wouldn't go with that idea very much. 

BBC Talk

• Age 6-14 years (CBBC)
• Age 0-6 years (CBeebies)

They are looking to remake Dangermouse.

"All home grown content is shit"

They moved from London to Salford.

There are 34 TV channels dedicated to kids in the UK.

CBBC is the number one kids channel.

Average weekly 29.1% 10.1% share 196.4 million iplayer requests for CBBC.

Most audiences are watching on the tablet and smart phones. 

Miniscule, How to Train Your Dragon, Scooby Doo, Dennis and Gnasher, League of Super evil, Strange Hill High, Arthur, Sidekick, Shaun the Sheep, Scream Sheet - Mckinnon and Saunders are making the puppets, adult comedy.

Zig and Zag - 2D animation.

Sidekick - based on the old style cartoon network like Dexter.

Laugh out loud comedy is what they are looking for. 

Fits with existing shows.

Scripts and characters are very important.

Shawn the Sheep was voted the nations best loved BBC show.

"The Kids are your Boss"

Never talk down to kids, they are smarter than you think. They don't do "fighty" stuff on CBBC like Ben 10.

Tips for writers

• Premise
• Character
• Setting
• Stories

Could this story be in another medium.

Love your characters.

The wider the world, the simpler the story.

Storytelling

• 3 Act structure
• Character driven
• Coherent within the rules of the world

PACE! Ultra fast  - can eat up a lot of the story.

Tone - No guns, No knives, No punching in the face, No cynicism!

Visual Style -  Anything goes (CG, 2D, Stopmotion, Mixed media)

Writing Process

• Writer's conference
• Springboards - paragraph length
• Outline AKA Premise 2/3 Pages
• Scene by Scene 2/3 length script
• Draft up to 6 but varies
• Polishes and shooting scripts 

Self Initiated project - Flob

The idea of this project is to create a 2D platform game. All the aspects of this game is all hand drawn and 2D. The game is about a blob fighting his way through each level, you can found out more about the idea here. I have started coming up with some concept art for the main character. I have been asked to create a blob like character. So to start off I look at various other blob like characters.

After looking through various images we started to get some doodles drawn up, to see what sort of shape and look we could come up with. 

These are just initial idea that we have come up with none of it is set in stone, we will be looking into a lot of different features, however as you can see from these drawings that there is an initial shape that we are tying to go for. 

This is the initial shape that we are going for.
The next stop is feature that will make the character stand out. The first feature we took a look at was the possibility of a mouth, we then thought that the character would be much be if it didn't have a mouth that stands out. We then looked at the eyes we have tried out so many different designs for the eyes from them being objects caught in flob's body for instance buttons but then that seemed too much like the character Coraline. We want this character to be different compared to any other character. The next thing we looked at was the possibility of flob having accessories like headphones, this didn't work as it was too much for such a simple character.

This is the final design of the eyes that I have managed to come up with. We went with these ones as they stand out very well and are very different to the eyes that you normally find in 2D characters. 

So we pretty much have managed to come up with a design for the character, now it is time to find his colour. We are wanting to go with a transparent colour that can work with various backgrounds ranging from a laboratory to a Forrest.

In order to see which eyes worked best we needed to try them on the character with colour. This told us that the big round eyes worked much better as it added more definition to the shaped of the character whereas the other eyes produced to many gaps and didn't work as well.  

                                     

                          

                                       

Bradford Animatiopn Festival Part 4 - RSA

• Student Design awards
• International Competition
• Founded in 1754

Competition

• Creative Conditions
• Moving pictures (animation)
• 1 min each

Ian Lesley Podcast - curiosity.

Alice - Design brief and society

How will your animation benefit society?

Is it a well designed brief?

Is this an amazing animation?

Wants to encourage emerging animators to communicate.

Yuval Noah Harari speaking at the RSA 9th Sept 2014. Positive, social, economic and environmental impact.

Animations that speak to social impact

• Lego - shell usage (Greenpeace advertisement)
• RSA Shorts

Carry out a broad search around the topic.

They want to see where your research is going.

They want to see how you have carried this out.

• Student Design awards: sda.thersa.org
• Sarah.wishart@rsa.org.uk
• bit.ly/RSAcuriosity full audio of Ian Leslies talk
• bit.ly/designandsociety - Full audio of Alice Rawsthorn's talk.
• bit.ly/rsaevent - RSA's events page.

Deadline - March

The history of ideas BBC

An opportunity for you to get involved.

Format in PDF (research) 

Maybe sketchbook format, Blogs?

They give you the opportunity to be commissioned - They give you creative freedom but with communication with the producers.

Bradford Animation Festival part 3 - Laika

Notes

• Laika as a studio have had challenges with collaboration at the start.
• They're a global studio
• They film around 2-3 seconds a week.
• They are really committed to stop motion. 
• Due to the technology now a days they are able to use hybrid. 
• They have created feature length films such as Coraline, Paranorman and Boxtrolls
• Laika also make commercials and short films. 
• Travis Knight is the president and CEO of the company.
• The company is owned by Nike co-founder and chairman Philip H. Knight. 

Images are subject to copyright

Bradford Animation Festival Part 2 - Mackinnon and Saunders.

Notes

• Started with a workshop.
• Over the last 21 years they have got more involved in the production.
• Just finished the puppets for Clanger.
• Been the animation production works for Dreamworks for Postman Pat. 
• They have now opened up a digital studio.
• The main process of the studio is to keep all the talent under one roof.
• They worked on Mars Attacks. 
• It was much easier to collaborate on Corpse Bride due to the internet. 
• They film around 6 Second a week.
• "As long as there are still creative stuff...then there is room for optimism"
• Harry Fallman is potentially making his next film in Stop Motion. 

Images are subject to copyright

Bradford Animation Festival Part 1 - Peter Lord

Notes

• Co-founder of Aardman Animations

History of Aardman

• Super hero falling down a hole - first sold animation, pencil drawing, The character was called Aardman.
• Peter Lord was 17 at the time. 
• Aardvark + Superman = Aardman.
• They ended up moving into Plasticine.
• They came up with a new recipe for Plasticine which worked better than the bought one. 
• This was inspired by the American Animation 'Evolution'
• They then worked with a program called Vision On. 
• They were the only people using Plasticine in the country.
• They then moved onto Take Heart and created 'Morph' in 1976. Shot on a 16mil film, shot blind. 
• They started to animate to live sound tracks. 
• They made a series of films using this idea.
• 1978 Down and Out.
• 1984 Met Nick Park, they got fed up of finding live sound tracks. 
• They abandoned the ease dropping and moved into interviewing people. 
• 'Creature Comforts'

Aardman animations have five different areas 

• Feature Films.
• Commercials
• TV series
• Games and Apps
• Rights department

TV Series - Shaun the Sheep

Digital Department - Collected materials from children across the country and created a film from it.

TV Commercials - They do loads of commercials. It is much more rigid, less interesting. Good training ground. 

Feature Films - 2 CG, 4 Stop motions.

Nick Park is currently directing a new film. 

Best alternative for Plasticine - harpature terracotta Plasticine (Morph). (Strong, Hard) Add chalk to Newplast Plasticine and Vaseline. "Use rigs to hold them up"

John Wright model makers.

Peter Lord has now returned to animating.

Aardman are very old fashioned, probably due to their generation. They used stop motion because they liked materials/ things. "Stop motion is collaborative and physical... but it is also playful" 

"The way the puppets are built effects the time it takes to animate"

Peter Lord is completely committed to stop motion animation. "Knowing that it is a doll you can pick up is appealing"

They have to keep to a younger audience due to not getting a wider audience when it is just for adults.

Images are subject to copyright.

Competitions

I have found various competitions and live briefs ranging from animation competitions to film competitions. My main aim is to go with animation briefs as they are more suited for the career I a aiming for. The most common competition to go for n this field is LoopdeLoop as this is an ongoing competition that changes every couple of months. They change the theme of the competition and you are able to enter various times. The theme for the months February/ March is Gravity. It can be any type of animation, it has to loop though. This means that the start and end frame needs to be the same. Not only does it have to loop but it also has to be engaging.

Another competition I have found is Creative Conscience, the deadline is 27th March. This can be any story, the creativity is up to you. There are various sectors in which you can apply the one I am looking to enter is the Illustration and Animation sector.

I have also found the 11 second club however the deadline is awfully close (28th February). So I may not have time to enter. It can be any form of media, no bigger than 10mb. You just have to make a story to go with the audio that is given. I am hoping to enter a stop motion or hand drawn piece, but this may be difficult as there isn't much time.

I have found a live brief that I am currently working on. It is a 2D platform game, my work includes all the concept art and hand drawn segments which includes drawing the character sprite sheets and drawing up all the environment. I am working with Stephen Wood on this project it is his self initiated project for uni.

RSA have 8 brief ongoing at the moment the one that I am interested in taking part in is the moving pictures task. This where I will need to create a animation to go along with the sound. There are 2 sound files to choose from on the website. However the deadline is March 4th 2015, which may make it difficult to make something in such a small time.

There is also a potential live brief in which I would animate to sound that is given to me. I am unsure of the deadline but I am very interested in taking part. Annabeth my tutor was the one who informed me about this. In order to take part I will need to find out more information.