FMP - Preproduction
The Beginning
I began my Pre-production jouney with an average sense of the film that I was going to proudce but with some missing gaps in skillsets. So as you natrually do, I set out to try and learn those skills in the pre-production stage to avoid coming into further issues in the future. This was the orgin of issues that followed . As my attention was not focused on the story and narrative but what i still hadnt learned in order to get there . Below was the 3d background that i created using my newly learnt blender skills. The goal was to use this 3D background to trace over for the animatic. simultaneously i was looking at ways of creating character designs that were fitting to stop motion puppet making, as my line art start was not suitable for stop moiton. (or so i thought). the first few weeks of pre production was spending on design and scripting in the backgorund .
Backgorunds for the storyboard
Character design ideas
Crunch time
as Crunch time started to get closer I realised that I despreately needed to go back to the drawing board and begin to write a script . the script that i has written I showed to my lecturer steve and jonathan as well as my peer Yasin for review. The empasis was on showing more ogf my family life and "what it like" to be in a an iranian family.
THE DEMISE
The demise of my project began when i started to think about this very question and how i hoped to represent my family and upbringing in a way that is visually pleasing to the comedic narrative. The issues i was facing were plenty . First and foremost the memories that i has about my childhood are slim to none. I have tried to have plenty of conversations about what its like to grow up in iran and or what type of pyjamas i was wearing to assist me with character deigns. but what I managed to collect were very fragmented memories that did not fit the image of the "orange and red" stop motion set was expected to create that would inevitably represent my culture. The demise occured, with the dawn of humanity : Ai . As i was testing out an AI tool which shall not be named. the following image was generated that clearly incompessed the expectation that was had of what others expected the film to be about and what the film, if i stuck to the direct replication of my childhood , would not be about .
My Grandfathers home in 2005
AI's interpretation of iraninan sterotypes
AI's interpretation of iraninan sterotypes
Myself in 2005
The solution
The solution : the solution so far has been no solution but to rethink the identity crisis and what i wish to show in the film . I have recived advice about replicating my childhood home accurately, so i went and laser cut some wood to put together the set for the living room scene . Although the set is not complete i believe building it from stop motion made me realise that the memory would not come across the way that i intend it to . I never the less did some visual experimentation in mixed media of what the film could potentially turn into as an inspiration for a new idea. which is the identity crisis of representation its self .
The set made
concept art/style frames for mixed media project
created from a scan of an iranina notes found on the floor at hendon station, due to the large iranina commnity in the region . siloutted to the iranian map
Effects added to brighten set image
Mixed media testing stop motion background with an unused character design from previous project
Experiementing with just 2d backgorund , drawing of iranian mountains in the backgorund