Kara | production blog of a stop-motion feature film

Tag Archives: Set building

Mini-Istanbul – a metropolis in one room

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The set building process:
First, there was an inspirational. Then (and those photos I spare you) I started to do a small plastillin blocking and drew rough groundplans of the buildings visible in the inspirational.
Then Eugen Kelle started blocking in 3-D until we had a set big enough for the camera move and sent out floor plans – basically the measurements of the set itself and the different heights of ground.
Pablo in Ruit built a wooden construction which was covered in styrofoam by Jörg. While Pablo started working on construction of the houses which include the practicals, Jörg started to saw back, middle – and later foreground houses from styrofoam – and would continue to do so for  several days, as there were many!
In the meantime the detailed “light-street-foreground” houses got into shape mainly on Nina´s and Susanna´s desks. More streets, groundplans, foreground houses, facade smoothing and filling, adjustment of all houses, fixing them to the set and finally the paint work – everybody working hard.
You guys in Ruit did an amazing job!

Highway to Istanbul

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This is our largest set – as it tends to become large when you have a bus traveling on a highway in a continuous camera move. Even though our bus is quite tiny, we ended up with a 6.50 m. x 4.50 m. set (basically as much as we could fit into our Waterloo Studio in Hamburg).
Jörg Steegmüller worked on the main construction, sculpting hills and the highway while Nina and Susanna worked on the details like the trees and telegraph poles. (Yes, those in the picture below are tiny, pin-sized isolators molded and cast from 4 different hand-made models.)

Little things that matter

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The few props we have in the teaser were crafted by Nina Milarch at Steegmüller Skulpturen. The bus, which is work-in-progress in this picture, is built by Pablo Pinkus.

The silk curtain

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After several tests searching for the best-suited material, Agata Rojek made our Marionette Theater curtain from thin and tricky-to-sew silk. Hers was not an easy task: the curtain had to be animatable, thick enough to not see through to the back but thin enough to allow a shadow play with back-lit characters. The result turned out better than we could have hoped for, with every fold lovingly hand-crafted and painstakingly measured.
Jörg Steegmüller and Pablo Pinkus built the rigging frame for the animation.

More set building

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Here are some more set elements from the marionette stage, which was built in Ruit. The stage is finished and waiting for set-up for the shoot by now. The beautiful paint work was done by Susanna Jerger.


Things to come

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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

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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.