FMP III
Pre - Production
Resources
Before writing the story for the film, I immediately knew that I would be short for time with this project. From previous experience, I know just how much time stop-motion takes. Not just animating scenes, but also planning, lighting, and editing. Because of this, I didn't want to have to create too much new stuff for the film and instead wanted to use pre- existing resources to get up to speed quickly.
This is where I found the baseplate and painted background from my old YouTube videos, such as for In The Wasteland aswell as previous College Projects. This instantly gave me an environment to work with, which gave me the inspiration for the story being a Mad Max style chase film across the desert.
On top of already having an environment to animate my figures, I also had my own private space to do it. My Dad recently refurbished the Garage with insulation, clean floors and a workbench which could comfortably fit my set. The Garage also had new lights fitted, which were excellent for stop motion. They caused no shutter for the camera and were very bright, lighting up the set extremely well. This was ideal as the film takes place on a scorching desert, which the bright lights communicated very clearly. The Garage ended up becoming a Studio, complete with shelving for props, solid wooden doors that let no unwanted light in and plug sockets additional technology such as the battery charger and extra lights.
The Car
Despite having an abundant amount of Lego vehicles ready to go, the hero car was actually built specifically for this film. This was because none of the vehicles I possessed at the time met the criteria that the car in the story needed.
The Car had to be relatively small, comfortably fit 2 mini-figures, feature opening doors and an opening Boot with sufficient space inside to store loose bricks. I also wanted the Car to be completely original, not based on any film cars. This was important to sell Power In The Machine as an original story, not a sequel or spin-off to something else.
Despite the script not being finished, designing and building the Car began.
26/03/2024
The build began with finding the wheels, 4 red alternate wheels used for the Back To The Future Delorean set. With the wheels now being red, the car would now follow that colour scheme.
The first build looked predictably terrible, with miscoloured pieces and a completely flat front. Despite the fact that the doors were mismatched, the boot would fall off every time it was opened and half the bodywork hadn't been built, it was a good starting point. My aim for the first few days was to build merely the "Chassis" of the car and worry about the cosmetics later. The car did fit 2 mini-figures and was of a small scale, so I was feeling optimistic about where it was heading.
26/03/2024
Later the same day, the first completed build of the Car is ready. Despite possibly looking even worse than before, the entire bodywork has now been realised and some key details from the finished car begin to form. Both doors now open backwards, like a London Cab. The back of the car features 2 wings extending past the boot. The engine is now sticking out the bonnet. A feature kept from the first design is the fact that the back of the car is lower than the front, uncommon in real cars. I always liked this detail as it looks like the Gold in the back is weighing down the suspension. With that said, there was still lots of work to do. The doors were too small, the front looked terrible, the windscreen was far too small and every single angle had miscoloured pieces, but that would shortly change with the next iteration of the vehicle.
27/03/2024
At this point I was happy with the overall structure of the vehicle and began to work on the cosmetics, which is where this begins to look more like the finished Car.
The 2 large golden headlights have been added, the rear is now almost identical to how it appears in the film and the colours now follow a clear pattern. Here, the top of the car is black and the bottom is red to match the wheels.
The Car not only looks far better than how it previously did, but now functions better as well. The doors have been extended, allowing them to finally close snugly with both mini-figures inside. The boot lid now has a new build that doesn't break apart every time it's used. The tiny front windscreen is completely gone, replaced with a more abstract approach of only having the A Pillars attached to the roof, eluding to there being a window despite that there isn't.
At this point the Car only needed a few small changes to be completed.
29/03/2024
Finally, the Car is fully finished, ready for filming. The main work done to the car here was just swapping out pieces to get all the colours to match. There have been a few extra finishing touches done to the car, of course.
The car now has a front bumper that sits under the grille. The bonnet has been fitted with grey "armour" pieces to make the Car look less stock. The red and black colour scheme has now been separated with a grey through-line, extending from the bumper to the rear wings. Aside from the doors being remade as I had no pieces in the right colour, the Car came together rather nicely and I'm very happy with how it looks.
Test Footage
Just before I began Production proper, I thought it would be important to create some test shots to see if there were any problems with the technology or how I'm animating. It would also give me an opportunity to get "back in the groove" of stop-motion animation, ready for when I begin animating multiple scenes a day.
The 1st Shot
This is the 1st ever shot recorded for Power In The Machine, and it's honestly not that bad. Its a very simple shot of the Car going in a straight line so, there wasn't much that could go wrong with the animation.
What did go wrong with this shot however, was the focus.
For whatever reason, all the early test shots had a bizarre problem where the focus would automatically change between each single frame. If you watch the city in the background, you can see it becoming more and more blurred as the scene goes on.
Whilst this could be useful for a handful of shots in the film, having it do this for every single shot was a very big problem that needed fixing.
After a few test shots, I messed around with the setting and eventually found a fix for this problem. It was an intentional feature that, for whatever reason, made the focus in each frame decrease by a tiny amount, even though I set the focus to Manual. Once I found the fix for this strange problem, I never had this problem again which already made doing these test shots completely worth it.
The Orange Desert
Early on, I was worried that the finished film might have a problem with shadow, as all the lights for the scene were above my head and could potentially capture my shadows.
To see if there was anyway to resolve this potential problem, I grabbed all the desk lamps I could find around the house and try to light the set using them instead of the overhead lights. The idea came from seeing stop-motion sets on YouTube, how they would have all the lighting in-between the animator and whats being filmed, so no light was coming from behind the animator to cast shadows.
My attempt at this effect resulted in an extremely striking red and orange desert, as-if on the cusp of nightfall.
I personally love how this lighting set up looks, it really stands out and looks much more hostile than what was eventually used.
The reason I abandoned this set-up rather quickly was partly because the lights used caused flicker between frames, whereas the overhead lights where always perfectly consistent. The set was also way too dark to capture any characters in any detail and the lights were really awkward to animate around.
However, the biggest reason why I didn't use this set-up is because I realised that the overhead lights didn't in-fact cast shadows, meaning they would work perfectly fine for nice consistent footage.
I was hoping to colour correct the final footage in CapCut to appear more like how this footage looks, but I ran out of time so this was left as an interesting alternate look at how the film could have turned out.
Blurred Wide Shot
At this point, I hadn't found a fix for the focus problem so I was seeing what shots I could achieve in complete blur.
For this shot, I tried placing the camera as far back as possible and animating the car as far forward as possible to make the desert look as big as I could.
Despite the focus being completely blurred, the desert still looked like a mere set. This was mostly due to how the backdrop was set up.
Here, the backdrop is sat perfectly vertical against the wall behind. This was a problem as the desert section of the painted background went up far too high, making the car look like it's driving next to a big sand dune as opposed to it actually looking like an endless horizon.
For when the backdrop is seen in the final shot, I angled it slightly so more of the painted desert sits under the baseplate with only a slither of yellow showing above it. This blurred the edge of the baseplate, making it harder to tell where the baseplate ends and where the backdrop starts.
Car stops to the Passenger
A slightly more complex bit of animation here with the Car starting by going straight, then turning to the Passenger, coming to a stop and opening the door.
The overall quality of these clips is now beginning to improve slightly. The backdrop is now looking more like how it will appear in the final film, with it being almost level to the baseplate. The lighting is also very consistent here, with no distracting flashing or shadows.
The animation itself is hit or miss, though. The car going in a straight line looks great, but the car takes the corner far too quickly and stops too suddenly. The door opening looks quite good however so it's a pretty mixed shot. It wouldn't make the final cut of the film, but it's pretty close to usable.
Shot Lists
The Final Step before going into Production was making the shot-lists.
These were made in order for me to spend less time planning what to film and more time actually filming.
All that had to be filmed was split into 3 separate lists, each focused on a different act of the film. 3 acts, 3 shot-lists.
Once the shot-lists were all finished and I had watched all the combined footage, a 4th and final shot-list was made for all shots I'd missed. Some of these were shots that had to be re-filmed, some I'd simply forgotten and others were additional shots that I hadn't originally panned for but would benefit the film.
Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Additional
