Slow as Ever

Of course production continues, slow as ever. I’ve employed a very talented, professional to do my storyboards (in exchange for guitar lessons!). That happened just recently, so hopefully with the next month or so, I’ll be able to start posting some panels. The big news, really, with a the storyboard artist (Scott) is that I can work out the story elements with him. He has many years in the TV industry as a classical animator and until now as a 3D animator. The things that will come out of this union are unforeseeable.

I am still pushing for the Tucker proton pack. That’s more of a motivation on his part, but it will come, if not I have a fall back guy (which in all honesty isn’t a fall back, I would rather have friends help me out). As for myself, at the moment I’ve been hammering out pathetic excuses for ghost designs and working out ways of creating this particular effect for the films. I’ve decided that I really want to keep this very true to the original and not change things where I don’t have to (original cast is obviously a given) so I’m going to create and shoot a puppet on a green screen and Comp it into the flick. This has some obvious challenges, however it was done for many many years, and there are volumes of do’s and do not’s out there. Especially with the technology we have in our living rooms this technique will look best. I’ve decided to take what poor drawings I have and some advice (and possibly nice sketches) from Scott and dive into building the puppet  so that we can get ready to shoot it and do some tests.

The puppet will built with a wire armature so that one or two people can operate in front of a green screen while the camera is rolling. This obviously limits many aspects of the film making process. One of the major challenges is that many (if not all) of the shots with this effect will have to have completely still camera’s. That is, we will have to find all the angles that work good for the shot and lock the camera off. No dolly’s, no pans, no cranes. This is a major limit. However, there are two Ghostbuster films that work very well with locked off camera’s. As a plus, this can really have a lot of character, I remember reading something from Guillermo del Toro about his Hellboy II experience. The gist of it was that he kept having to send the CG shots of the monsters back because they lacked character and performance. CG just has too many perfect moments. It is so easy to make a perfect performance, do exactly what the director wants you to do. What is difficult is adding in those subtleties that give you character, and naturalistic qualities. Things like twitches, a line slur, a stumble or misstep, you don’t get this in CG unless the directors ask for them and in those cases they look rather unnatural. Puppets bring back that human quality, if a wire gets stuck and creates an odd sneer for a couple of lines, or the puppeteers arms get tired and the character favours one side. This all comes back with puppets.

I’m actually quite excited to get a bunch of little tools out with some wood, wire, tubing and latex and get to work on this. I’ll post some proper pics of the design soon, hopefully