Update

Hey all id like to give you an update of whats been going on in this past busy weeks. For pushing out daisy we have our biker big travis casted but are still searching for actress especially for the role of daisy the aging mother. With this down time in casting we have been working heavily on what we want the animation to be like and have been meeting with our animator while she is in town. We our going to keep it a traditional style of animation with little to no use of computer programs such as maya. Sarah has been working on some more animation sketches of the scenery and what the final product is going to look like for some scenes, i will get these up as soon as they get scanned in the computer.

I have started learning how to work with wordpress in hopes of having a website down the road and i am creating a blog for my portfolio of work in my time at SOU. I am still working on my concept for the site because i want it to showcase but my work but also be able to broadcast my ideas and opinions especially related to the Art/ digital media field. I am looking to call it art attack and i am working on the layout of teh site along with the navigation right now. I am wanting to make it look very clean and as little like a blog as i can, more like a website. My original idea was to have a splash page with a logo and a font i made but that option is available on websites only not in wordpress. So i plan to have the logo and font still on my site as the header to the page here is the image and the font so you guys can check it out.

I want to have a basic layout of the site done today along with the diffrent pages i would like to have available "Home Photos Videos Ideas and About" this coming weekend and week id like to start getting my work up on the site while me and a computer science colleague of mine work on the design of the blog and incorporating my work into a logo. i will post more as it comes and i would like to have the blog live and ready on June 6th for our last critique.

Casting Call So Far

In the past week and a half i have been making slight changes to the script while we search for actresses. For instance the only actor who responded for the first couple of days was an actor named David Hoffman www.davidhoffmann.com. Big Travis the biker only appeared in animation but David has the look of the leader of a Biker Gang and experience riding. We are finalizing the ending but it will be a mix of the live action being seen in animation and seeing what was predominatly animation in live action, like Big Travis.

Other than David we have an actresses interested in the role and are still casting. We are planning to have a script read through with all interested actors on May 1st. I will post any updates on the casting processs and the flow of animation and live action mixture at the end as soon as we right it out how we want it.

Critique

We are working on locations for our film we have the mood of all the locations in mind but not exact locations for every one. For the interior we are striving for a chaotic victorian style home. We want to achieve the look of victorian drapes and furniture mixed with Daisys everyday living. We are planning on going around to local B&Bs and location scouting, here is a list of local B&Bs with some shots of the interior.

For our exterior location we want a large victorian style house with a porch and fencing up. The coolidge house B&B in ashland epitomizes this style as you can see here //www.coolidgehouse.com/. For the hilly streets in the end of the film we have many around ashland and plan on looking for the best locations. For the interiors we are going to scout B&Bs this week and try to find the best interior we are looking for. If no B&Bs workout we will look into residential homes we could possibly transform. Heres a list of the B&Bs in ashland we would like to go to, with some pictures http://www.abbnet.com/browseinns.asp .

Sarah Week who is handling the animation portion of Pushing out Daisy has storyboarded but has no additional drawings since them. She is wanting to wait till we cast actors to make the animation look like the actors. But i believe at least with daisy the 80 year old version of her and her 30 year old animated self would be accepted to look different. We do have a visual concept in mind of how we want the animation to turn out and want to experiment with many techniques.

We are looking to use the style of pixelation which is a stop motion technique turning the actor into a stop motion puppet. An example of pixelation can be see in the bolex brothers "The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb" here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3YKBOkfmbU&playnext=1&list=PL8CAB607FEDF9BF13

We also want to experiment with the use of cardboard sets and props mixed in with the animation. Like in the flash back with Daisy Driving we would like the establishing shot to have a cardboard background with a lil cardboard car driving. And on the interior shots we would see Daisy and Anne in the car in animation but see cardboard trees outsie the window next to animated clouds. We would like to mix cardboard trees and cars into our animation kind of like in this snoop dogg video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6speA_XhP4 except there are no plans to do cardboard work in the live action but its always a possibility.

We will also be using basic 2D animation to tie the animation together. We are looking at other techniques such as puppets which sounds very cool to do but may not be right for this project.

we are holding an open casting call for actresses and are looking for 2 female leads to play middle aged and elderly women. The photo i am adding is a visual Ad we are including along with a written paragraph on craigslist looking for actors, it will be posted later today.

Art 450 Project Proposal

The title of my project is pushing out daisy.
One sentence Description: It is a dark comedy about a middle aged woman who must come to terms with the overwhelming personality of her dying mom. Using animation and live action film in a short film utilizing flashbacks to blend the mediums.

One paragraph description: What is life worth living if your vicariously living it through your eccentric, ex-biker, aging mother? Pushing out daisy is a dark comedy about the complex relationship between Anne and her dying mother. Anne must come to terms with the overwhelming personality of her mom. For Anne the lines between the imaginary and reality of her life begin to blur. By showing this relationship in animation and live action we get a view into Annes past and learn about her eccentric mother.

One page description: What is life worth living if your vicariously living it through your eccentric, ex-biker, aging mother? Pushing out daisy is a dark comedy about the complex relationship between Anne and her dying mother. Anne must come to terms with the overwhelming personality of her mom. For Anne the lines between the imaginary and reality of her life begin to blur. By showing this relationship in animation and live action we get a view into Annes past and learn about her eccentric mother. In order to show how these lines blur for the charachter of Anne the short film will utilize a combination of experimental animation and live action film sequences. Through the use of flashback and dream sequences we see how Annes life is with daisy. We see how Daisy has made her crazy and how this pushes Anne to finally find her own life. With an eccentric cast of charachters including Anne the middle aged woman who puts up with Daisys ways. Daisy the crazy octogenarian Ex-Biker and we meet her biker gang of followers and their leader, Big Travis.

What i want to complete this term: During this term i want to produce a sharp 30 seconds-1 minute trailer. This term i want to have the actors cast and all video recorded. Meanwhile the animation is being drawn and not all will be done this term but we will have an animation sequence in the trailer. I want to be prepped for post production after this term so i can edit the film together over the summer with the animation as it is completed.

Technical and Research Issues and visual research: This term we will have multiple things to research. I am casting and in a search for actors i am also constantly looking for possible locations. We are working with a musician in San Francisco and working on a score for the film. Technically i am looking at many diffrent forms of animation and combination techniques using live action. I have been watching old disney films in which live action is mixed with animation from mary poppins to alices wonderland. It is making me want to combine animation and live action in the same shot in at least one of the scenes of the film, possibly the ending. The science of sleep was also an inspiration in working on this film with its lack of a firm sense of reality and its transitions.

Timeline: I am in the process of casting actors and location scouting. I would like to have the actors and locations by the 22nd of febuary or earlier. Once we get these done then we will immediatley go into shooting when we can. We dont have a date when we are shooting yet but it should be 2 days of flming with most of the film taing place in one indoor location. The animator for this porject is attending art school and working on this project at the same time. The animation is coming in as fast as she can animate but we are expecting it to take longer than the live action. So we have selected a few scenes we want animated first and we plan on using those in our one minute trailer which im planning on having finished by June 6th. After the trailer is done we will have all live action recorded and animation should be almost finished so this Summer if all goes to plan we should be in the editing phase and hopefully done by August 17th.
If you would like to see my charachter designs and storyboards scroll down and check out my blog, all of my pre production work is on here.

Pushing out daisy production timeline and future goals

Its the 28th of Febuary as i write this and its kind of freaky to think about how fast this term has gone. I joined 450 in the begining of the 3rd week of school. I set a goal for myself at this point at where i want to be today and i wrote it down, that goal was " Have animation portion of film in the can". I learned alot about film making in the past 7 weeks but i think i learned a bigger lesson from setting a goal and working on it during the term, i learned how to manage my work. I may not have any footage filmed yet but after the last 7 weeks i know when we do shoot in march we will be more then pre pared and will hopefully be able to speed throguh the filming with all the details we are figuring out before we even pick up a camera. Here is our productions schedule from what we have done to the completion of the film.

By March 3rd the script is going to be complete it will transform from a spec script we are using to get our ideas shot to a finialized shooting script. All of the shots have been written down for 90 percent of the film so far. Between now and the 3rd we are finishing editing part of the story and workin out minor details but also completing the shot listing for this 10 percent of the film. We will also have the shot list done by march 3rd and on march 4th we are going to have a finalized read thru of the script. If actors have responded by this point with intrest we are going to extend the table read invite to them as well. Either way in this meeting we plan on not only reading the script but having all ideas for the filming of it finalized along with our selection of shots so when we do begin filming we will not be standing around we will be going from shot to shot. We have a minimal budget and will have our final breakdown of our budget by shooting but we have a changing budget right now we are running with. We will also have our equipment rentals figured out. I have a colleague with a cannon which we can use and we also have the use of a mini hd camera. We may borrow from RVTV any other cameras we need and other equipment. We are also looking into local rentral shops and trying to get discounted rentals for a slot in the credits.


We have all the live action storyboards and our animator will have the animation storybaords finished by march 7th. We will also have mood boards by this date to discuss style for the DP, costumes, editing, music, etc. During filming i plan on having the script of course i will also use storyboards to remind me of certain shots but for the most part everyone on set will go off of the mood boards. Our prop list is complete and we are looking for a few props still such as a wheelchair and an oxygen tank. With me and my co creator on this project being a senior as well we have been very busy and not picked a final location yet for our inside scenes. By the 11th we want to have a location picked and an arangement made with the owner so we are prepared for shooting. The exact day of shooting has not been chosen yet because we have not picked our actors yet but ideally we will film it between the dates of march 12th and march 27th. We our slated for only 2 shooting days, one being inside and doing all interior shots in one day at one location. The second day will be for the porch scenes outside and any shots we missed or need to catch up on that day. We are flexible and would like to shoot two days back to back but may need to spread out shooting based on our actors.

If things continue going decently smooth and we get our actors we will be finished shooting the live animation of the film at the latest the end of march. With the animation in the film taking up almost half of the time and the animation being done all by hand, it will take a little longer and we plan on having all completed animation by may 1st. During this month or so time of waiting for the animation we will be working with chaz anthony on the soundtrack and by may 1st the score will hopefully be not only finished but mastered and ready to be in the film. Not only is chaz anthony working on the soundtrack Trevor Robison a local Ashland musician is writing music for the film if we feel it goes with the mood of the film, which is a great option to have. In this time span we will also start editing together all live action sequences and these sections should for the most part be finished by the time we get the animation storyboards, with the exception of the music. And we should have our film finished with its final edit and all put together by June 5th.

When the film is done we have plans on what we would like to do with it, we plan on entering it into multiple film contests some we would like to enter would be the ashland independent film festival as well as the DC short film competion which can be read about more here http://www.dcshorts.com/screenplay-competition// It has only a 25 dollar early submission fee. Allison also plans on entering her script in the gimme credit international script competition. If this film fulfills the standards i think it will i would like to enter it into sundance in the short film catagory if anything to say i tried. I dont think theres much more i havent told you about but to recap June 5th is our deadline we would like to be finsihed by then so we can start entering the film in competions. I had a good experience with pre production this term and cant wait to see how the rest of the film goes.

The Music Of Pushing Out Daisy.

While in Pre production me and my co creator allie are trying to get all desicions made for the film that can be made before shooting or being in the editing suite. And a large part of the film experience is the music and for this project we had an idea in our head of how we wanted the music to sound, we just had to find someone who could express it through music. The style we were thinking of would be an instrumental mix of sounds with a finished product sounded like somehting you would hear at a second hand circus or a psychedelic amusment park. Chaz Anthony a composer from LA is doing the score and is working on multiple organ inspired pieces, we do not have any of his recordings for this film yet but you can listen to him re score the end of inception here on his youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/mrchazanthony along with more examples of his work. I have had suggestions in my 450 critique on suggestions of old free music and i am keeping these resources in mind, we have a great composer for the soundtrack but i am willing to mix and match. If i had to pick a soundtrack i believe is going for the same effect as we will be going for i would suggest listening to the natural born killers soundtrack. It is an original score by Trent Reznor. The sound is what i would like something that is emotional and flows with the images and adds to the experience but does not distract from the overall experience.

So those were my storyboards but thats just a part of the pre production we have finished. In my next post ill be talking about our musical score, our composer and style of music we will be using hopefully with samples.

Pushing out daisy Storyboards continued

so your 2/3rds of the way through the tale of daisy and anne, if your still reading this im hoping your still kinda entertained by what your reading only one more blog post and the rest of the story will be up on the blog.

Pushing Out Daisy, storyboard singles

Here are the storyboards for pushing out daisy including for the animation sequences. This is up to the second animation sequence the storyboards will continue in the next posting. Tell me how it reads.