Rejected Character Design

Here is a quick character I came up with, and quickly rejected.


Although my nightguard is meant to be inexperienced, this deisn appears too young for what I was intending.

Owlet CGI Wings Tests

Here are two tests I have conducted into integrating CGI wing elements into a stop-motion animated scene. Which do you prefer..?





I like the first for its speed, and the second for its wing shape. The perfect result therefore will be a combo of the two.

Owlet Design Influences

My owlet is designed to be cute. He will be necessarily cute because then it will make the moment when he dies all the more powerful. The owlet’s primary intention in the story will be to antagonise the nightwatchman in various annoying ways, mostly just through his being there.

His actions are not malicious or deliberate; he is young and just playing.The design for my owlet will be unreaslistic in as far as shape and anatomy. My owl will basically be a sphere with wings. He will not fly like an owl, instead more like a bumble bee or a hummingbird in that he hovers in one place before rapidly switching to a new place in the air. This will be in keeping with the annoying nature of his presence. He is not a graceful bird, he is clumsy and about as unaerodynamic as you can get.

The influence for my owlet character comes from multiple sources as pictured below:

Firstly, just how stupidly fake and spherical an real owl can look.

Everyone's favorite: Woodstock of course. I want to emulate his fantastic animation in the flight style of my owlet.

The hummingbird: Again, this bird's method is flight is what I hope to capture, at least in part, with the animation on my owlet. Getting into the more obscure now...

As much as I dislike to take reference from Harry Potter, the Golden Snitch successfully captures the spirit of my owlet - small, fast, hard to catch. Plus it is a sphere with wings as in my original design intention.

This little thing is Clocky the Run-away Alarm Clock, and the stress I feel every morning when he runs away from me is exactly the kind of feeling I imagine the owlet induces in the nightguard. Everything about it from its erratic movement to its speed and noise are downright annoying. Perfect. And finally...

My cat. I've always though that she looks a bit like an owl, but more than that I'm drawing influence from the times when she has jumped onto my stop-mo set in the middle of an important scene in the past, and caused me a fury not unlike the one I hope to induce in the nightguard when he finally snaps.

Wow, long post... design drawings to follow.

Canon EOS 550D Baby!

I now have one.

Some Castle Imagery

Here is some general castle imagery by way of basic research into the design for my fortified wall set.


Rustled together from google images.

Background Experiment

Just a brief test to gauge the feasability of using a LCD monitor as a background in my film.



It looks fair for a first attempt, but as has been pointed out to me, syncing the camera's shutter speed with the monitor's flicker rate and maintaing that for the duration of a shot would be very difficult. Evidence of this is in the above test, wherein the brightness of the background hills fluctuate.

Straight in with the Animation

Yeah, I know we are only in the preproduction phase of our final year films, but when you have a shiny new ProPlus armature arrive on your doorstep it's hard not to play with it.

As it is this test was done in haste with my new armature soon after I completed its lengthy construction (my hand is still sore from all that sawing).



This thing is miniature craftsmanship and moves so smoothly. I just hope I can do its superb articulation justice when it comes to animating with it for real, and not obscure its range of movement too drastically with the addition of the outer foam covering that will create the character's form. Already his torso is kinda hard to bend, and that is without clothing.

ProPlus armature courtesy of the excellent people over at animationsupplies.net