Friday, October 06, 2006

Georgie & Company, Part 4

To the left are my gravediggers, whose appearance in GEORGIE'S WISH that makes me smile every time I see it. Originally, Grandpa's resurrection was to be a big solo number, with no witnesses. But as I kept thinking about what sort of transition I was gonna use from the cemetary to the street-crossing scene, the idea came up to use these guys as a cutaway. I like the contrast of Grandpa's dramatic entrance with the quiet, incredulous "WTF?" look on the guys' faces...a throwback to VALLEY OF GWOMBI humor where characters say the most when they say nothing.

The short gravedigger was built over an old stop-motion model that I picked up really cheap on eBay. I think he was constructed for a TV commercial but never completed or filmed. He had no head or hands, has an aluminum wire armature, and the body was covered in rapidly dry-rotting foam rubber. I decided to recycle him since he wasn't much to look at, gave him a head, hands, and some new duds, and cast him as the driver in DREDD MANOR that takes Adam Wellsbrook to his doom. He will have a larger role as DM progresses, if he hasn't been recycled into a hundred other things by then.

The tall chap is "mini-Steve", built to complement "mini-Gary" from the previous post. Steve Eliot is real-Gary's co-host on FOR THE BOYS, their outrageously politically- incorrect talk show. Since the animation for that show was never done, mini-Steve, like mini-Gary, was just hanging around here unfinished, waiting for something to come along to give his life some meaning. I'm really glad I had him for this, as I think these two guys make an awesome visual pair:

3 Comments:

Blogger Darkmatters said...

Awesome! I especially like the little glimpse behind the scenes about your way of constructing the movie... a transition between two different parts of the film.

3:48 AM  
Blogger Michael Granberry said...

Cutaways are vital for stuff like that! It can be kind of a pain to shoot them because (speaking for myself) I like to do only as much animating as absolutely necessary to tell the story, so there's not a lot of wasted shots. I think live-action filmmakers have one up on us in that regard...they can point and shoot film all day, and have lots of stuff to cut away to...

7:27 PM  
Blogger essay best said...

It is simply wonderful to have your blog post especially a glimpse of the movie that you have given to all of us is a delight to see. I hope that it turns out to be great movie.

4:00 AM  

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