Live Brief - Collaboration on One Minute For The Planet

Another Environmental Film, I Am Home

I have contacted Claire Tuton after seeing a call for a stop motion animator. It is for One Minute for The Planet competition by NAHEMI (National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image). Never have I ever worked with a more bubbly person. Two second-year students also worked on this project and we got allocated a puppet and its animation each.

Challenges: 

• Filming outside the University, the rigging of characters and props on location, access to suitable equipment on location. 
• Making a puppet that can be fitted and animated inside a bottle.
• Knowing what exact action is required from the puppet and therefore what rigging is suitable.
• RSI, my dominant hand started hurting inconveniently before making a re-make of the puppet and so I had to leave a lot of wire twisting and some other tasks to Claire, who was happy to do it under my supervision. But we ended up with a third re-make after all as the needed longer fins which we found out during test animation. 
• Not sharing information and not putting it into my showreel - it is part of an entry into competition with extended deadline due to Covid-19 situation.  
• Having very limited time on location to animate as we had to take turns within two days. 
• This puppet originally did not require the ability to do a walk cycle and I have never animated a four-legged creature in 3-D stop-motion. But it managed pretty well when I got asked to walk it across a microwave top. White tack was my friend. I have used it to hold legs in place or lift legs where needed. Although it did not stick very well to the felted legs. 

What went well:

• Claire does not hold back if she would like something different, which was actually a great experience of working with a client. She was also very engaging and wanted to be informed of everything going on. I hope I can work on a project with her again. 
• For puppet re-make number 3, together with Claire, I have tested colouring polymorph with acrylic paint. This was a very messy experience and took a lot of time but the result is gorgeous.
• Surprisingly rigging the puppet with a sellotape across a cross-section of the bottle worked well. 
• A project filled with a lot of new experiences. 

For this project's submission, I will be making a pdf with photos of the making of, descriptions and video files of test + finished product to submit due to the nature of the project.