Manta Rays, Vocal Booths, Painted bits of paper

Hey Everyone, 

Hope your Friday is going well. Just wanted to post a few behind the scenes pics of what we are working in our workshop. This work is for the forthcoming "Creature Corners" video clips.  They will be short videos featuring creatures doing their thing in the recording studio. 

The clips are a bit of a "proof of concept" as we continue to develop the Creatures of the Late Afternoon world and begin to populate the various miniature apartment buildings with different characters.

The one we are working on today is a Manta Ray.  It will be recording some vocals in it's video.  That's him on the left as an initial pencil sketch. 

We decided to go with trying different types of paper and card to give the puppets a paper-y texture.  Paper is Corinne's medium of choice!  

**By the way, if you haven't seen it yet, here's some EXTRA CREDIT FOR YOUR HEART AND SOUL:  Watch Mark Osborne's incredible animated film The Little Prince this weekend. It's a wonderful film based on a wonderful book.  Also, Corinne did all the art direction on the stop motion sequences using only paper!**

Here we were trying some different paper textures for the creatures...

Corinne chose some color palettes and painted her "paper fabric" using watercolors. These will serve as the decorative fabric from which the scales, feathers or different textures will be cut. 

Corinne punched out tons of little circles from the paper using a very hight tech piece of gear known to us in the industry as a "hole punch".

Then, she proceeded to glue them on to the creature one by one...

Here's the vocal booth.  I'm still working on how we will light the set on the inside.  The VU meters don't move, but you'll probably be paying more attention to the singing Manta Ray anyway....

And here's Manta Ray in the vocal booth for scale...

And here is the another creature in the works who is based on some great barrier reef coral!

Next, we'll be working on the lighting and camera angles for each Creature Corners clip. We are also testing some eyelids on them so they look a little less "stunned".

Once everything is built and lit, we will film the creatures in their studios. I'll score the and add sound design afterwards. Each clip will be around 30 seconds. They will be strange but beautifully silly and we hope you will enjoy them. Stay tuned!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!   

E