Diorama Sequence
February 11, 2018 |
| Moodboard for Diorama Sequence |
This is one of the video I stumbled across during my research and I simple love every single thing about it! From the transitions between scenes, the music, the style all the way down to finer details.
Who knew paper cut outs could be so fascinating!
Another one which really stood out to me was this lovely paper cut out video:
Last video, I promise. I'm only throwing this in because I feel this is getting to where the director wants it to be.
At first when I saw all these videos, I thought to myself, okay. That is doable. But after a meeting with Heidi, I realised that what she envisioned is something completely different and a lot more advance. She wants a diorama sequence with a little more dept than these paper cut outs, and she wants us to use fabric for the waves with fans underneath to blow the fabric.
Base on her description, we all came up with mini models to try and figure out how we might go about doing this. There were 3 production designers, myself included, and we decided that we were each going to make a mini prototype model and see which is the best way to go around making it. These were the 3 different concepts.
STEP 1: EXPLORING IDEAS
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| Sketch Up Model of how it might look |
In the end we decided to combine all of our ideas into one. We are going to use slits at the bottom (as shown by the SketchUp model above) but have the layers going all the way up, with the one closest to the camera smaller and going wider as the layers go further back. (Image shown below) This will help fill up the space and the block colours makes the sea appear deeper and more vast. STEP 2: CONSTRUCTION  |
| Final Construction Plan |
And then it was time to get constructing!
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| And of course, Julian being Julian |
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| Basic structure for the Diorama Sequence |
And the best thing, we managed to construct this for only £5! What a save! (We managed to cut cost by scourging about for scrap wood and found a crate along with some spare wood that we cut down.)
STEP 3: DETAILS
A little fun fact that I learnt while making this treasure chest, if you want to bend the cardboard like what I did here to get the dome shape, all you need to do is lightly score the card with a scalpel. Since this is a wooden chest, the visible scores actually add to the feel of it. Win-win situation. :)
There is 2 treasure chest here, one 2D and the other 3D for two different scenes in the diorama sequence. I tried to keep to the style in line to the rest of the aesthetic but layering it up and outlining them in black marker afterwards.
STEP 4: STORYBOARD & EXECUTION
Do you know what is sad. Is the fact that we did so much all for a 20sec imaginary sequence...I don't think the director knew it would be this time consuming to make it, but I am pleased with the final results and I hope she is as well.
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| Rough Storyboard I did |
STEP 5: PRAY
And now that everything is done, lets just pray and hope that everything operates smoothly on the day of the shoot and we do not look like fumbling fools.
SHOOT DAY
This was a very fun but extremely exhausting day. As filming started at Goldsmith 9am, we had to leave our respective homes really early to be at Wimbledon by 8am to collect the props for transport to Goldsmith. We were lucky that we ended up bringing a box full of extra supplies for standby as the director made a lot of last minute changes that we had to make on the spot. We ended up splitting the day into 3 separate scenes that we needed to film. The first being the opening sequence of the cliff in the background, the second being the boat out at sea and lastly, the underwater scene.
Scene 1: OPENING SEQUENCE (CLIFF)
Scene 2: ABOVE SEA
To make the fish jumped out of the water, we adhered magnets to the back of the fishes and the other on the other side of the background. The background was made out of shower curtains, so it was thin enough for the magnets to hold. At first, we were going to do this with fishing wires, however, this limits the jump and we could not make a nice curved jumped. Instead the fish looked like it hopped out of the sea as opposed to jump. With the implement of the magnets, we could control the exact movement and projectile of the jump. It also meant that there were less strings to worry about getting tangled up as this scene had a lot of other elements happening as well. There were the clouds, the changing of small pirate ship to a bigger pirate ship, jumping fishes, the moving waves...etc. In fact, we had the ENTIRE team (Even the producers and lighting crew) to help with the execution of this as we simply did not have enough hands to control all the actions.
Scene 3: UNDERWATER SEA
I think this was one of my favourite scenes. Maybe because it was the most challenging in terms of all the different elements coming together, that made me liked it so much. It is also really nice to see the lighting people work their magic to create the "under the sea" vibe. They put a large blue filter over the light source to create that soft diffusion of light. But what surprised me was instead of securing it nicely in place like one would expect, they purposely hit it once in a while to create movement in the light. This made the shot less static and gave the illusion of moving water. Realistically, there is no bubbles present under water, but then again, this is a kid's imagination. We
took the liberty and decided to add that in as it also helped made the shot more lively by adding more movements to what otherwise would be, a still shot.
In this scene, one of the thing we struggled the most was getting the treasure map out of the bottle and unraveling itself before sitting inside the treasure chest. We ended up doing this with fishing wires and for a 2 sec shot, required 3 puppeteers (Aka us) to manoeuvre this trick. As it is physically impossible to have the treasure map coil itself up and fit into the bottle on its own (the neck of the bottle is quite narrow), we filmed this scene in reverse. So in the editing process, they simply have to play it backwards for the action to be in order.
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