This year we decided to enter the second in the now annual Birmingham creative community‘s 48 hour film challenge, Filmdash.

The idea of making a stop motion animation is one we had last year, but beyond doing a test shot of two seconds with Tailycat – our lead in The Quest – we hadn’t got around to taking it any further. So when Filmdash 2010 was launched, with the general theme of ‘happiness’, we thought what better than to revive our animation idea with the two happy Jellycat toys!

As per the Filmdash rules no scripting, shooting, or planning was done in advance of the start of the challenge at 7pm on Friday – the only thing we did beforehand was to make the decision to do the animation using the toys. At the 7pm start time we got our criteria, containing a mandatory line of dialogue (“you’ll feel it in your blood and guts”) and a mandatory prop (a scarf).

Our process over the weekend was:

Friday evening

Initial ideas for the plot, deciding which characters would be used and how, and drawing up of the basic storyboard.

Saturday all day

Principle photography, rendering all the still photographs for each shot into a motion .avi file, first (very) rough cut of all the shots into one continuous video.

Sunday morning

Starting to do the special effects in photoshop (an idea which was immediately abandoned!), starting to do moving subtitles for the dialogue (another idea which was immediately abandoned), replaced by doing silent-movie style caption slates.

Sunday afternoon

Incorporation of background music soundtrack into the film, a series of rough cuts (three in total) in order to get the timing for the caption slates right, followed by exporting the final cut and uploading to YouTube.

Not only was this our first film with a story (I’ve made a number of YouTube films which are more documentary), it was also our first animated film – and after the fact (well during the fact on doing the postproduction work on Sunday morning) we can see all the errors we made – some of the focussing is a bit off, had we known we were going to use caption slates we should have left each shot before each slate linger just a touch longer, the special effects (which were going to be the kiln getting hotter, and the dalek firing its gun) were dropped, the penultimate scene (shot at the end of the day using fading natural light) with The Oracle really could do with having been re-shot entirely, my tripod, whilst smooth enough for normal use isn’t really smooth enough for panning and tracking the micro-movements needed for animation, and the scenes we shot right at the end of the day really did start to have bigger movements between each frame (thus becoming jerkier) as we started to get tired and wanting to ensure got it completed and uploaded by the 7pm Sunday deadline. And due to a whole day of crouching for extended periods of time in awkward positions to take each frame, I’ve twisted my back a bit!

But these are all things we would have done just the same had we spent two months making the film rather than two days – and that would have been well annoying! We were also a bit compromised by having a bit of a rubbish computer – about five years old and not the fastest processor available even at the time, using the free software which came with my hand-held video camera  (Adobe Premier still seeming to be a bit temperamental on this computer), the best thing about which can be said is ‘well it sort of works’.

But in the process we’ve learned an awful lot in a very short time about how to make an animation, meaning for Tailycat’s next adventure things should hopefully be a bit smoother. Many thanks to Chris Unitt and Ian Ravenscroft for their work in organising it, and also thanks to all the other Filmdash entrants for helping make it such a fun challenge to participate in!

The complete set of Filmdash entries are now on YouTube.