Unit 4: animatic

Unit 4: Complete story board

Unit 4: Story telling. ladder concept

Unit 4: Story telling. Lion

Unit 4: Storry telling. Aardvark turnaround

Unit 4: Story telling. First shots for story board

Unit 4: Story telling. Unfinished environment concept

Unit 4: story telling. Crocodile

Unit 4: story telling. flamingo

Unit 4: Story telling. concept of the main character

Unit 4: Story telling. OGR 2

OGR2_unit4

Unit 4: Story telling OGR1

OGR1_unit4

Unit 4: A.Hitchcock's film "Rope" review

Alfred Hitchcock „Rope“ film review

Figure 1

80 minutes mystery/drama/crime movie “Rope” (1948) is one of the last and the best films of Alfred Hitchcock. The story is about two New Yorkers, who murder their friend David by strangling him with a rope. Just after a murder two young, good looking men throw a party and hide corpse in the antique book chest. The party guest list includes victim’s father and fiancée. The strangest thing in the movie is that food and drinks are served on the book chest, in which David’s body is hidden.  All action is in one room, which contains big window and gives a wonderful Manhattans view. The fact that all the action is just in one place, makes film quite unusual and slow. “Hitchcock was interested in seeing whether he could find a cinematic equivalent to the play, which takes place in the actual length of time of the story.” (Canby, 1984) The slowness of the movie and the fact, that there is a corpse in the middle of the party makes film really tense.  Hitchcock proves that raveling “the secret” at the end of the movie; it is not the only way to make viewers interested and shocked. He surprised audience with revealing the secret at the beginning of the movie, what makes movie tense every second. It seems like any second the murder can be revealed, because party guests start to miss David and one of them, Rupert becomes incredibly suspicious.

figure 2

Furthermore, at first five minutes the movie seems really unemotional, however later it really involves the viewer. Probably the reason why, is the way movie was filmed. “In an ordinary movie, closer shots indicate more intensity, longer shots are more objective. Camera movement helps establish mood.” (Ebert, 1984) Camera is standing in the way it looks that a viewer is a part of the movie. It mostly shows faces and half body during conversations, what we used to see while standing next to another person. Second of all, as mentioned before, the time line is slow, what gives us a taste of the reality, and at some points makes as forget we are actually watching a movie. It seems that the movie is barely edited, what makes this film different from other movies and again gives as a feeling we actually in this room in Manhattan. The only moments, were views of camera was showing through the guests backs and on the screen we were be able to see just black suit, the camera angle or time line were changed. These one of the moments which makes us realize that the movie is actually edited.

figure 3

The last but not least, if we would look at the 1940’s, when the movie was created we can see that Alfred Hitchcock not just broke the rules by his filming methodology, but also touching the topic of homosexuality, what was not common at that time. “Though the film was made when any suggestion of homosexuality was taboo, 'Rope' is explicit without actually committing any offenses the Production Code could object to. Brandon, who dominates his homosexual lover, Philip, strangles David with ordinary clothesline. David's only crime seems to be that he's 'ordinary,' i.e. engaged to be married. It's OK to be “normal” but not “ordinary,” because “ordinary” means being boring and average.”  (Levy, unknown)

Bibliography

Canby, Vincent (1884), A. Hitchcock’s “Rope” film review (online) http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/03/movies/hitchcock-s-rope-a-stunt-to-behold.html?pagewanted=all [accessed 06/02/2012]

Ebert, Roger (1884), A. Hitchcock’s “Rope” film review (online) http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19840615/REVIEWS/811069998/1023   [accessed 06/02/2012]

Levy, Emanuel (unknown),  A. Hitchcock’s “Rope” film review (online) http://www.emanuellevy.com/review/rope-4/ [accessed 06/02/2012]

List of Illustrations


Figure 1, wikipedia.org, (unknown) A. Hitchcock’s “Rope” poster (online) http://http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/Rope2.jpg [accessed 06/02/2012]

Figure 2, wwwcinemastyle.blogspot.com (online) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjChKPbWw0hWAjo-KmyGwF5dIQDVPRklgGtaSWYcpZHU-D4tWyVM3__eFM-cw_Ia8Dco0NeiVqsLWnZkCZIwgQuTADQ8hvQMaCcdrnUxbAv1ScErKQi7vxL9YKtifSenEbkywnCvS1Vs_k/s1600/Rope_1948_33+crop.jpg [accessed 06/02/2012]


Figure 3, classicmovieman.blogspot.com, (2011), shot from A.Hitchcock's film "Rope" https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw6_xo1rGPzjjNRpEbibGXJb0PHSeBErZ6xVusqTYO6b5T9Acs03K39ahkhrkLTzrDTt4kMX5v8SVFA4mkHytGt9BUMAOlvEAYylJtYYhrQHv4HNsaHxGWjepQwb3nYcKn53jL886Rbj8c/s1600/Rope+cast.jpg [accessed 06/02/2012]

Unit 4: First design for new character

So, this is first design for my new character: aardvark (: However still working on it (:

Unit 4: Influnece map for new character

This is influence map for my new character: aardvark (:

Unit 4: Story telling. Ideas for charaster and story

Character:

It's been 2 years mouse Pipi lives in the zoo. No one brought her here, she found the way to this brilliant home by her own. She loves spending days here, so many people come to see animals, but however no one pays attention to this little mouse. The most popular in this zoo are flamingos. Pipi likes them as well, they remind her ballet dancers. She saw a ballet once, when she was looking for food supplies and accidentally mixed ballet theater with a bakery, which were standing in the neighbor. From that day, she dreams about being famous ballet dancer…. Or just become of these incredible pink birds….

Story:

As every day Pipi was sitting on the fence, looking at flamingos and dreaming of becoming famous ballet dancer. However as always she face a problem: she cannot distinguish reality from her own dreams. So she starts to dance for real.. She accidentally gets into the lions cage, which was not fed today, so it starts to hunt Pipi. However she does not notice that, because she is imagining herself on the stage, beautiful as these pink birds..

After few minutes she gets into another trouble, she splashes pig, which wanted to be clean today with a dirt.. It makes Pig angry and it starts to chase her as well…

Pipi continues dancing and jumps on the ladder left by the warden of the zoo.. Even Pipi was quite high, however it wasn't an obstacle for the snake.... but it appeared that snake was too heavy, so ladder fell on the panda's head… All four animals start to chase little mouse.. However they accidentally run into each other and fell.. And little mouse Pipi finished her dance on the fence and finally attracts people's attention, because of her incredible dance. And in the background we can see confused, tired animals(:

Unit 4: Story telling.. ideas for character

I sketched some animals, while deciding who my character should be

Unit 4: Maya, bowling ball (homework) (:

To make the animation I looked at this video:

Unit 4: Maya tutorials: bounding ball (off center pivot)

Editing lesson 1

Unit 4: Story telling. Ideas for a character

Character:

Lily is 10 years old. She always was different from other same age children; you can even notice that from the first sight, because of her weird behavior. When she grows up, she wants to be a famous ballet dancer, wear a wonderful white dress which reminds her beautiful swans. This little clumsy girl, goes to ballet classes twice a week, but it seems that it‘s not enough for her. Lilly is a dreamer, she day-dreams everyday.. Oh and if you can know what is happening into her mind. All her thoughts fly around good and beautiful things and one of them is of course ballet. It seems like she see all the world though the pink glasses. However sometimes girl does not distinguish her dream world from reality anymore, and that just drives her mother crazy. Sometimes little read-head Lilly starts dancing in places she should not. That often puts her and her mother into a big, big trouble.

Unit 4: story telling research

Swan lake, and swans transformation into a girl, was used in many movies, what is really great for inspiration. But in the other hand it makes difficult to create an original story. That probably is one of the difficulties I faces, while trying to write an ideas for a story. So, I decided to continue my research and I found "Carnival of the Animals" ballet, where ballet dancers presented as animals

Unit 4: Influence map

I looked at ballet dancers, who played role of swan in "swan lake" ballet and swans in zoo so far

Unit 4:Inspiration

I tried to think more about my character.. What can relate ballet dancer with a zoo... "Black swan" was great inspiration for me to realize that, one of the most famous ballet is about an animal: swan.

This movie gave me an idea of swans transformation into a ballerina.

As for more inspiration I looked at Disney film "Princess swan" transformations scenes

Unit 4

As a character for unit 5 I have got ballet dancer, for environment - zoo and prop - ladder

I started to think about my character. First of all, I tried to draw first visualization/ thumbnail of my her just preliminary imagine how could/should ballet dancer look like. For now, I feel like doing female character.

So far I came with some key words for my story:

* country - Russia
* Ballet dancer is chased and hiding in the zoo
* Nighttime
* She is chanced because she own money to drug dealers/ or her husband is criminal and she got into the trouble.

So these are just first ideas for the unit 5 (: