Blocking – Kara | production blog of a stop-motion feature film

Yesilcam – how we started

Posted on April 15, 2013 by admin

We had an inspirational design, a sketch and then glued and taped together another analogue blocking.

: Inspirational

: rough sketch

: Blocking

Here comes a little overview on things to expect here in the next months. As you probably noticed from the other posts, artwork is created and sets and puppets are being built, we are just getting ready for a shoot. As part of project development we are producing a 2.5 minutes teaser, to give an impression of how the feature film will look and feel like.
The film is ambitious and also technically very demanding. All this we also wanted to have in our teaser, just a bit shorter (not smaller).
We have a crew of 25+ people from 9 countries, 4 sets built in 4 different scales (shot in 5 different scales) as part of one continuous camera move shot in s3D and 3 main puppets. We will start shooting on 2nd January 2013 until end of February 2013, doing the post production parallel.
Soon there will be coverage of the shoot here, too. Until then, here is a timelapse clip of one of our blocking sessions.

blocking timelapse

The curtain rises for the set builders

Posted on December 20, 2012 by admin

It´s about time we introduced our set building team and their work. At Steegmüller-Skulpturen in Ruit, close to Stuttgart, the fabulous four Susanna Jerger (Head of Set Building), Jörg Steegmüller, Pablo Pinkus and Nina Milarch work hard to give our puppets a stage. And with a stage they started.

We know, of course, about the existence and possibilities of a digital layout – and a DLO sometimes indeed does come in handy to plan a set. Still we deliberately decided against it and went for an analogue approach. From other productions we remembered how the rendered plans from the DLO sometimes also posed a limitation towards the artistic approach. You are tempted to rely more on the numbers from the rendered files than on the artist´s eye.
Sorry, long story to explain the first pics: From the inspirational drawing via a little cardboard set we blocked a 1:1 cardboard set – in which we manually blocked our camera move, too. From this blocking we took final measurements and handed them to the Team in Ruit.