Story Concept... More thoughts

Story Concept:

Aesthetics:

We want to present the tone and feel of the poem in which I was originally inspired. We’ll be using old teacups, a wooden dock, and natural lighting to have an organic and natural feel to the film.

Movement: The choreography of the piece is the part that will need the most attention. We want the teacups to reflect the phrase “a slide of hand”. The movement will be very similar to street games and magic tricks. We’ll need to watch a lot of different styles of stop motion animation to come up with the precise way we want to move them. Drawing up storyboards is the next step.

Sound:

I like the idea of playing around with natural sound. It’d be fun to create a sound scape of several different isolated nature sounds. Also, it’d be super cool to have someone slowly read off the names of teas and their descriptions. We can weave that track in and out of the natural sounds.

Stop Motion Art Film Treatment

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

With silver bells and cockle-shells,

And pretty maids all in a row.”

Masses of vintage mix and match teacups liter an old floating dock on the Black River. The backdrop consists of swampland made of algae, stumps, wildlife, and trees that seem to grow out of the river. The tea colored water moves slowly between the dock and swamp. The delicate teacups contrast against the darker natural location. They start to move. They spin, slide, and jump to the music. Different colored paint droplets fall rhythmically over the vintage cups enhancing the soundtrack-motivated dance. It is visual poetry.

The poem above is the feeling I want for this piece. It will reflect the tone of the poem as it was used in The Secret Garden, so a short sweet poem but with a darker undertone.

We are going to use stop motion to animate this short, which means a lot of research on our parts. Also, the planning of this will need to be extremely precise. Thankfully Mike (DP) has experience with stop motion.

Location: We are planning to take a weekend and stay up at my family house in Atkinson County to complete the shoot. The house is located on the Black River and has a floating dock that we will utilize.

We will need to start research on stop motion immediately as well as start watching a lot of stop motion animation pieces for inspiration and ideas. I really enjoy Jan Swankmajer’s work so that’s where I intend to find a lot of motivation. I really want this to be visual poetry. To enhance the poetic feel about it, I want to play around with shooting through gauze.  Since it’s a stop motion piece, this would create an always-changing texture while still softening up the picture.