Great puppet construction on this macabre short film. Read on to hear from Director Isabel Peppard about the ins and outs of this fruitfully labor intensive production.
Isabel Peppard:
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- I guess some of the challenges of the production revolved around the scale of the production. There was a huge bulk of work that needed to be produced and a really small crew, mainly myself and my partner, Beau White. This meant that the pre-production stretched out for over a year!
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- Another technical issue, that I did a lot of research into before shooting, was the silicone colouring/painting for the puppets. I did a lot of experiments with different silicone paint systems and intrinsic colouring (colouring in the moulds) so that I could find the best paint stick solutions. The paint jobs on the characters needed to hold up for a 9 month shoot and they really did in the end. Animating the Factory set was a real challenge, it took Nick Hilligoss and I eight hours to shoot a few seconds of footage. We used
- ‘s live preview function to gauge the movement of the cogs and conveyer belt as well as the character movement. We ended up working together, taking one half on the set each. I also found Dragonframe’s lip sync function effective and easy to use. As an animator who hadn’t done lip synch before, I was worried about how hard it would be but the software really helped and it ended up being quite simple. I used the drawing on screen function a lot to plot my movement arcs and increments, I found this function very useful.
-Thank you, Isabel. Job well done!