Extra Terrestrial Cattle Mutilation

More fun with motion -

Going Through The Motions...

Just started playing around with Motion on the Macs at work, it seems like a really good program! Here's a little alien I made, more to come soon...

Fridge Inspection!

Here's a rough edit for my first PRP artefact. I'm gonna do two more edits with different sound, a creepy one and a funnier one. Enjoy!



There are a couple of sound issues I need to sort out, all the shots from inside the fridge have loads of that fridge hum in the background, haha, so there's a bit of work to be done on it yet, especially before applying the soundtracks.

Sound FX & After Effects

I've just finished some filming for, potentially, the first of my PRP artefacts. There's a fair ammount of editing to be done, but the bare bones are there and I have a rough edit rendering at the moment. The film makes heavy use of After Effects, and I think so far it's probably the best work I've done with that programme.
I've been having a look around for various sound effects too, and have found quite a large ammount but with varying degrees of quality. I've been thinking about how different pieces of music can work here too, and thankfully this time I'm not restrained by copyright, as the film is not for commercial use, it's just to illustrate a point.

The Quantum Matter Oscilator

Here's the latest photo of the time machine. This one appears in the pilot, but in the actual film it'll have more wires and stuff all over it, and be plugged into a larger piece of apparatus.

Time Machine

I started making the time machine for the film, by painting up an old water pistol. I gave it a layer of white first to help the silver paint show up -


And then added several layers of silver paint -

This should be dry by now, so I can add more details in pen, and I'm thinking if I can find a clock face to fit in the back of it this would look pretty cool. It'd also mean as Dr. Tipler uses it on Roger, he could dial in the time by moving the clock's hands around, which would be cool!
I started painting a mask for the robot too, I was thinking if I get like a cheap bike helmet from somewhere, I can paint that silver too and it'll start too look more robotic. This mask still has a way to go however, it needs all kinds of wires and maybe some LEDs slapped all over it -

None Of Them Knew They Were Robots

I've been thinking more about the original script and how I would actually film it. Fitting the story into six minutes is gonna be pretty much impossible given it's complexity, but would split nicely into three short films, the first ending just after Roger goes forward in time, the second ending just as Roger gets into a fight with the robot, and the third part would be Roger returning home and changing his life.
I was talking to my flatmate Elliot about how much this film could end up costing, and Elliot estimated around £500-1000... I'm not sure if this guess is a little too high, but either way I'll have to raise a bit of cash to help build the set for 'Chuck Voyager' and the robot. The set will be appropriate if it's really cheap and tacky looking, so with a bit of imagination I'm sure this wouldn't end up costing a great deal. The robot, on the other hand, could be a little trickier. It's okay if it looks a little cheap, as after all it was made on a budget in the actual plot, but I don't want it to just look like a load of cardboard boxes...
The robot should be humanoid, and as non-threatening as possible. Maybe a robot that looks sort of like this would work -

It wouldn't be too hard to make a reasonable robot suit by sticking chunks of painted card onto a jumpsuit for added flexibility, and then modifying a bike helmet a little to act as it's head.
A robot like this would be quite easy to achieve too -

- but I'm not too sure I want the robot to look like this. It doesn't have much of a personality, and looks quite ominous in a way. Even the robot in this film is meant to be slightly incompetent, it's still supposed to be quite a lovable character. I want the audience to feel kinda sorry for it when Roger has a go at it, and I'm not sure a big chunky box would be able to convey things like this...

This is a kinda classic robot style, which I think would work really well given that 'Chuck Voyager' adheres to so many sci-fi stereotypes and conventions, so the film will be quite consistent stylistically. I also like the idea of robots getting more and more complex as the human race advances, then cheaper and poorer as it declines, meaning that the final robot that was produced does resemble something out of 'The Jetsons' rather than 'I Robot'.

This is a similar design to the last one, but I like the rounded head! If you were to make this into a costume, you could put eye holes in the mouth bit, and then put big LEDs or something in the eyes to give it a little bit more personality.

Another pretty classic design, this robot looks awesome and is actually quite a basic design - human body shape with dials and switches on the chest, and connections on all the joints, it's just the head that could pose a problem. However, I'm sure with the right lighting, and from the right angle, something like a bunch of bottle tops and old loo roll tubes stuck to a box and painted silver could look like a fairly convincing robot face...maybe?

Whilst searching about for robot examples I found this awesome picture too -

Scripting!

Just came back from the first lecture and seminar of the year, and even though I didn't get feedback for my script as we ran out of time, it was still very useful. However, seeing the length of many of the scripts compared to mine has made me doubt whether I can actually squeeze this story into 6 minutes... I'm not going to totally discard the idea at all, but I'll try working on some other scripts tonight just in case. This will mean tomorrow I can gain feedback on all my ideas, and then choose which one is best to go with. I have a few other ideas for stories knocking about in my head, but at the moment none of them are as solid as the time travel one, which still isn't even totally solid as it is, haha!
I was also thinking of how I would design the robot. Building a plasticine robot, animating using stop-motion and then blue screening it into the film would look awesome, but may not be entirely feasible... I was thinking I could just build it out of cardboard boxes, and the robot explains that as he was created when the science department's budget was at an all-time low, he had to be constructed out of waste materials. It's a bit of a cop-out though. I also thought maybe the robot could have been built so well that he does just resemble a human being, but this is also quite a lame way of doing it.
Here are some sketches for the sci-fi idea -

Film Ideas

I've been thinking of some ideas for the second term project, and so far have come up with a few vague starting points. I've been trying to think of ways to achieve the fantastical and outlandish on a student budget, rather than just thinking of a basic story. This may prove to be too ambitious and more of a hindrance, but here are a few ideas (more for my own benefit than anything else) anyway :

- A zombie film! More an urge to fulfill a childhood dream than a fully fledged idea, really. A few props and a little imagination could go a long way here, although there's a always the danger it could just look way too crude and rubbish, haha!

- A sci-fi spoof? Still not entirely sure on this one, but I had an idea that basically involves some guy that plays a role in a TV series like Star Trek or something, with really terrible looking sets and effects, then goes home after getting off the set one day and is abducted by aliens, who then steal his body and go to his place of work and then, erm....do something. With hilarious results. Needs a lot of work if it's gonna be a worthwhile idea, but it'd be fun to film a really poor looking sci-fi show (along the lines of 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace' or something similar), and then contrast this with more understated, mundane looking 'real-life' aliens. I dunno, I'll give it some thought.

- The use of basic props to convey different time zones or eras, for example 'Planet Of The Apes', a replica of the statue of liberty gives the impression of the absolute desecration and destruction of planet earth. I'm not entirely sure yet how this could be used to my advantage, but it's a good thing to start thinking about. Maybe a film about cavemen would be good fun, or a primitive race in the future finding remnants of our civilization. In fact, how about a film where someone is chryogenically frozen, wakes up in the future, and finds the earth totally devoid of mankind's influence apart from a few select artifacts? I dunno, that's an idea that just popped into my head whilst typing this, haha!

- A film that drifts between someone's conscious and unconscious thoughts, like reality and dreams. To create a dream-like atmosphere wouldn't be too hard to achieve on a small budget. 'The Science Of Sleep' achieves it through the use of stop-motion animation and some fairly elaborate props, but Chris Morris' 'Jam' manages to get a dreamy, delirious feeling simply through editing, relatively simple effects in post-production to manipulate the footage and audio, an ambient soundtrack and the sheer surrealism of the sketches.

I'll keep thinking through ideas, it would be silly to build the plot around an idea for a special effect, but I'm really drawn to the idea and challenge of making something bizaare on a budget. I have a few ideas for simple stories too, but I'm not really too happy with any of these at the moment, so they'll need a bit more thought. I'll post them up on here within the next few days if I can think them into anything relatively solid.