Floor Plan.

More work done on the set for Project Innocence, this Monday.

At the weekend, for the good of the team, I put myself through the soul-destroying hell that is a visit to B&Q. After being harangued by Alan bloody Titmarsh on loop tape in the garden department, searching in vain for the right sized wood and then futilely trying to find a price on the not-quite-right sized wood, which was all they had —I emerged broken but unbowed and loaded up my van with some timber and hardboard sheets.

On Monday afternoon, me and Stefan got to work, laying down some more cross-pieces and staple-gunning on the hardboard for the floor and rear wall. As you can see, the hardboard was just annoyingly too small for the stage frame, so we had to improvise a bit.

Next job will be the side walls, which will take some more imaginative botching. Here is Stefan doing all the work, while I stride up and down, bawling contradictory instructions and signing the occasional autograph for passing fans of slipshod carpentry.

After they got fed up with me hanging about looking dejected, because I wasnae allowed to play with plasticene too, my 2nd year animation students took pity on me and said they’d allow me to design one of the characters for our forthcoming  ”Project Innocence” stop-frame animation.

Presumably because they’ve already seen the state of my drawing and modelling skills, I was given the job of designing and building Charlie, brother of the main protagonist, who spends most of his brief appearance in the film clad in an old army greatcoat and German Pickelhaube helmet [war relics, belonging to his granda], so that not much of him is visible, apart from his chin.

Luckily, I specialised in Chin Design at art college, so I feel confident I can meet the demands of the brief. Here are a couple of early scribbles to get the ball rolling:

Since I’m looking forward, in the next few weeks, to bollocking those of my students who’ve not bothered to post anything to their PDP blogs, since the current term began, I thought I’d better get my arse in gear myself, lest some barrack-room lawyer pipe up with a, “Please stop hitting me with that length of two-by-four dear tutor for, in our indolence, we were only emulating your good self!”

So, here come a couple of posts from the “Leading by Example” school of lecturing:

Project Innocence, is the working title we’ve given to a stop-frame animation film, which I’ll be making during the course of this academic year with a select band of my 2nd year animation students. By “I’ll be making with…”, I mean, “They’ll be making… while I stand around. pointing at things and generally getting in the way” 

Project Innocence is a story of a young girl, Innocence who, whilst staying at her granny and granda’s house, along with her brother Charlie, accidentally unleashes havok  when she innocently [pun intended] begins playing with some old Voodoo dolls, which she stumbles across in the attic.

Here’s a wee ‘mood-boardy’  type doodle from my sketchbook, which I scribbled up after one of our early production meetings, where we’d thrashed out the bare-bones of storyline and setting.