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Production of Prop

I firstly started the creation process of this by building a miniature model out of clay so I could give myself an idea as to how I wanted my staff to look, it would be my guideline to follow.  I began creating the actual staff by firstly building the crystal which was going to go on the top of it, I did this by firstly creating a wire frame of the crystal and I then used clay to sculpt the actual shape of it. Once it had dried I painted it, using colours like pastel purples, pinks, blues and mint green, following along with my finalised design that I had created for it. Once the paint had dried I went over the top of it using purple, pink and blue iridescent pigments that would reflect and change colour in the light, adding a more mythical feel to the crystal. I also placed holographic glitter on the more raised parts of the sculpture which would reflect in the light.

I wasn’t able to get a wooden branch which I had previously planned to use so instead I needed to use the end of a wooden broomstick which worked rather well. The hardest part was going to be attaching the crystal to it, especially making sure that it wouldn’t fall off and get damaged but firstly I wrapped a material around the stick and tied it into a knot, fitting with my concept work. I stuffed the sculpture with thick tissue to give it some support before I placed the broomstick inside it, it did provide some support and caused less movement but it was still fairly loose so I used a hot glue gun and super glue to seal the inside and attach them together though I would still be fairly careful with moving the staff. Lastly was attaching the lights, I had planned to put the lights inside the crystal sculpture to make it glow but as I had suspected, the clay was too thick and the lights couldn’t shine through it so I needed to improvise. I instead wrapped around the outside of the crystal and around the broomstick and I believe it worked pretty well for having to improvise. I was also able to easily hide the battery back for the lights up inside my sleeve.

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Special Effects Assignment: Concept and Development 

I had an idea of what I wanted my prop to look like which was very mythical, like it belonged to some type of forest fairy so I looked up some ideas on Pinterest and created a board for them, I generally looked up for things like crystals, wooden staffs etc. anything that looked mythical I drew inspiration from it.

I then did some concept art for the staff as well as a blueprint plan of it. Finally I created a final design of it as well as developing a colour palette.

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Special Effects Assignment: Research

I firstly started this assignment by doing research on what Special Effects were and the different types of them. I found out that Special Effects actually splits down into two categories which are Mechanical Effects and Optical Effects so I tried to research one of each type as well as adding in research for props as it’s what I was going to be doing for my special effect.

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First Special Effects class

Today we had our first class for Special Effects and we were tasked with taking this picture of an elephant and we needed to edit it into the photo of the landscape by following a tutorial on how.

To do this we used Adobe After effects but instead of following the tutorial which was very complicated I instead used the method of Keylighting that was much simpler and easier than the tutorial. Keylighting is the chroma key process and by simply selecting the colour of the green background I was easily able to remove it and blend the elephant in with the background

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Favourite Film #3

Strange Magic is a 2015, 3D animated musical fantasy romantic comedy film directed by Gary Rydstrom and produced by Lucasfilm. Based from the story by George Lucas which is inspired by William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  With a battle sparked over a powerful potion, the tough fairy princess Marianne crosses paths with the powerful Bog King.

Strange Magic is a gorgeous animated film with a beautiful story line that has a good message for the younger generation. 

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Favourite Film #2 Treasure Planet

Treasure Planet is a 2002 film 2D animated science fiction film produced by Disney and this film is an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s adventure novel “Treasure Island”. The story of this film follows the story of Jim Hawkins, a boy who dreams of a life of adventure on other planets but when he meets Billy Bones his life changes as he discovers that the famous Treasure Planet may be real after all. 

The storyline of this film is truly beautiful and extremely well written, to go along with that the animation and the visuals are also fantastic. Simply this film is a masterpiece compared to other 2D animated films.

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Favourite Film #1 The Dark Crystal 

One of my favourite films would have to be the 1982 film The Dark Crystal. The Dark Crystal is a fantasy adventure film directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz. The story follows Jen an elf like “Gelfling” who is on a journey to restore the balance to his world by returning a lost shard belonging to a powerful but broken crystal.  In my opinion this film is incredibly underrated and not as popular as it should be for I have never come across a film as special and as different as The Dark Crystal. This models and puppets that were created for this film are amazingly made and designed as well as all of sets that were built by hand. 

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First class

We had our first class for Script writing on Tuesday of this week, after we had been introduced into the class we were given our first task. Before hand we learnt about an important feature of script writing which was that writers usually break down their scripts into three parts Setup, Confrontation and Resolution. Setup is usually the beginning of the script. You use the setup to introduce the audience to the characters, a bit of their story and the environments around them, essentially giving an introduction to the story. Confrontation is around in the middle of the story and it is when something bad that creates a problem needing to be fixed.

Resolution is most likely to be at the end of the story and it is when the confrontation is resolved and fixed.

So for our task we had to look at two animations and figure out where the Setup, Confrontation and Resolution happened in each of these animations. The two animations we looked at were Spellbound by Ying Wu and Lizzia Xu and the other animation being Home Sweet Home by Pierre Clenet, Alejandro Diaz, Roman Mazevet and  Stéphane Paccolat. 

With Spellbound it was quite easy to figure out where the script had been split up into these three sections so it didn’t take us that long to find where but with Home Sweet Home it was harder considering there was more than one confrontation in the animation which caused a lot of confusion within the class leading us to discover that scripts can have more than one confrontation as well as that films/animations don’t always end in a resolution.