CARVED

it was a great experience for us and we were glad to have worked with such motivated and interested students!

we payed ARRI another visit this wednesday to upgrade our film with a professional color grading by Bianca Rudolph. it’s been amazing to watch her work her magic on CARVED and to learn a few things about working with Resolve.

Yesterday night was THE night! Our stop motion short film CARVED was shown at the Ohmrolle fall collection 2016! We'd once again like to thank our team and every helping hand we had, working on this project. We also want to thank our families and friends who haven't seen a lot of us while we were working on our film. Thanks to everyone who was there last night.

at the beginning of the week we went to Munich to get our main mix done at ARRI. most people forget how important good music and sound design is for a film. we already had an amazingly talented composer and sound designer on our team and we were glad to have a professional re-recording engineer find the right balance between music and sound for our short film.

last week was all about color grading. we used DaVinci Resolve to adjust our colors and get a nice pre-grading done. to our surprise the software was relatively easy to work with (considering that we never used it before). it is very comprehensive but also neatly arranged and lets you see the results on your grading immediately. so working with it was a lot of fun!

today we went to Meloton in Munich to record foleys. it was fascinating to see and hear how authentic sounds for each of our characters were created with such precision and expertise!

post production on a stop motion film is just as important and time consuming as the animation itself. for CARVED it involved removing rigs and/or glue that held our characters and props in place as well as stabilizing shots. we mostly used After Effects and Nuke for this part of the work.

Here is a small Making-Of that shows the progress for one particular scene.

last week we finished our last exterior shots, what means we now had to remove most of our set to get to Witold’s cottage. or rather, inside of it.

we are very sorry for the lack of updates! right now we have started to animate the first few scenes of our short film and it’s lots of fun to get back to it! here we are, making a few last refinements to our set before we put our main character Witold in place and start animating!

we spent the past few days sewing a brand new tunic, belt and armor for Doran. The tunic is made of linen, colored with a textil color and acrylic mixture to increase the saturation. Doran’s belt is made of soft dark leather, either glued or sewed together. Its buckle is made of milliput which we painted with a golden varnish. Like the belt Doran’s shoulder armor is made of leather, though it’s a bit thicker and more robust than the other material.

a little update on how our short film CARVED is getting along; we’re planning to start animating in a few weeks and Doran seems to be more than ready to get moving ;)

our magic blue flowers are made of wire, paper, a lot of glue and acrylic paint. because each of our figures has tiny magnets in their hands they can actually pick the flowers up and hold them. we also built a wooden box where Witold keeps the flowers he collects. it’s made of balsa wood, wood glue and colored with a mixture of water and dark acrylic paint.

to make our set look as realistic as possible we decided to cover the ground, the trees and rocks with moss. we used wood glue to apply moss and dirt to the styrofoam. we applied an extra layer of moss around the edges of the rocks/trees to make them blend in with the ground.

some test shots of our (almost) finished set. Witold’s cottage, the rocks and trees are in place and the only thing left to is to add our matte painting. work-in-progress photos will follow soon!

We also rethought the screenplay and made a few changes to it. Actually we had three versions of the screenplay that we really liked. But unfortunately we can only realize one of them ;(. We thank all the people that gave us inspiration and motivation to keep working on the story! Especially Jürgen, Christoph and Lucia!

Additionally we made more simple moulds for more flat masks and arms. This went very well, and we are happy with the results. We recasted those with gypsum, because they will be integrated in the rocks next to Witolds cottage.