Pre-Production Personal Project- Gobi and Babi

Pre-Production

I was excited with the freedom we had gotten to create our own personal project, as although I have been enjoying the 2D and 3D animation of our course. I have missed doing a bit of stop motion animation from time to time and would like to encourage my learning and building of experience in this field. I had already created a Claymation once before in my previous education course before university, so thought about the idea of creating paper puppets this time around and making a paper stop motion short instead.

I had expressed to Henry my tutor in the beginning step of research for my personal project, that I have never been keen on the storyboard process in creating an animation and although I can do this and create an original story from research and my own ideas. I would really like to spend most of my time crafting the characters, background design and the more practical approach of making the paper puppets, as I would need them to be movable puppets and striking characters.

(Marcela Caldron)

This is when Henry suggested that I find a story or tale that has already been created and adapt it myself to fit my style of work and continue from there on. This is when I decided to search some classic children’s stories that everyone would be familiar with, but that I could incorporated into my work.

I decided upon the children’s tale ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and from my research the story is adapted in many ways across the world, with vast differences from the story being told in Norwegian or German. The base of the story is about three goats travelling across a large bridge with a troll who lives underneath, the troll isn’t accepting of the goats using their bridge for their transporting needs and decides to take it into their own hands to scare them off and get rid of the goats who are just looking to cross over to the hill.

What will vary when the story is told across different countries, is how the troll punishes the goats, this could vary from the troll being more sweet and kicking the goats off, to as brutal as murder and attacking them. However no matter the story there are always three goats different in size, a bridge and an angry troll who lives underneath.

(Photography-Marie)

I settled upon using this tale as my base story, however, already knew that I was going to adapt some parts of the story for my own work and would be keeping the stuff that I wanted to include in my own animation. I kept some parts of the story, such as the troll under a bridge and three animals crossing it, but changed up how the troll reacted and changed the three main characters to sheep instead of goats. The idea to change the goats to three sheep instead was on a whim but one that I was happy to do, as I was excited to create some sheep characters and the resemblance of three sheep and three goats wasn’t far off from one another. (Photography-Marie)

I had also on my daily walks, was able to capture some great first-hand reference photos of some lambs and sheep in the local farm and even got some great video footage of how the lambs bounce along as they run and I knew that this could be used as a great walk cycle reference when I got to animating my puppets.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8535eb_832b0397f9694f50a2c7fbbe00d02fd4/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

(Photography-Marie)

The story which I was going to use was now decided and I was going to then start drawing up some concept ideas for both my troll and my sheep. I already grabbed some reference photos for the sheep and for my troll was going to draw a classic troll like the one from the story, with my own personal touches. However I did want my troll to be wearing a cape for some added texture, I grabbed some personal references of me with a blanket around my shoulder, to look like a cape and had taken them in order to help me draw the cape around the trolls shoulders accurately and to get all the details of how the sheet would fall, its creases and movement.

(Marcela Caldron)

I began drawing up a number of different designs of bodies, faces and personalities for both the troll and my sheep and just wanted to allow myself the freedom of drawing whatever came to my mind and slowly narrow it down and re-define my ideas to a more reliable and simple character design.

(2D Drawings- Marie)

Once this was completed I then finalised my character design to two main characters, including a sheep called ‘Babi’ and a troll named ‘Gobi’. I was able to take the time to make sure the designs I had created were what I was happy with and worked with the style of animation I wanted to film. I finalised my drawings some more with variations of face and emotions for each character, tested out different colour palates to make sure my colours worked efficiently and then developed on from my first initial design.

Developing on from my concept of my baby sheep, I wanted to create the two bigger sizes of sheep and almost present the sheep as in three different stages of their life, so the smallest being a baby, I made the second biggest a teenager and the biggest sheep being an adult/ senior sheep. This was adapted from the original story of the three different sizes of goats, however I gave it more substance by adding story and age as another difference amongst the sheep. Adding in different elements such as the sheep growing more hair on their knees or beards as they age, looking more tired, bigger bodies and fine lines and wrinkles showing a sagging and fattening effect with more age.

(2D Drawings- Marie)

I drew up my final compositions of my sheep and troll once I had felt like I done enough research and trial and error with character design to find the best suitable design for my paper puppet animation, I drew up my final designs with a colour palette and began the next stage of production.

(2D Drawings- Marie)