Kiruna Festivalen

'17

Cut-out animated commercials for the Kiruna Festival ’17

For the 2017 edition of the Kiruna festival, the idéa was to create a cut-out animated film where the bumble bee flies past flowers revealing the musicians that will perform at this year’s festival.

The bumble bee was animated on the computer for the most part, while backgrounds were made as a mix of paper and computer graphics.

For each release, there was a short film revealing the artist, and then there was a longer film with all of the main acts and I was also responsible for the design.

The music, the same as last 2016, was written and performed by Martin Eriksson at TCB i Kiruna AB.

For:

Year:

Music by:

Homepage:

Kirunafestivalen

2017

Martin Eriksson, TCB i Kiruna AB

www.kirunafestivalen.com

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Waiting for the bus

To get to the closest town Pikku usually, actually always, has to take the bus. The bus departs every six hours from the village bus stop.

I based the design of the bus stop on the ones used by Länstrafiken Norrbotten. Red lower part and blue roof.

Made out of foam board and finn board. Painted with acrylic paint.

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Indoors

The backgrounds in the film are a mix of miniatures, animation, and video, composed in After Effects and Photoshop.

Indoors it’s mostly miniatures. I take photos of the rooms in approximately the correct angle and combine them with the Pikku-footage, that I have shot against a green screen.

The best part of photographing miniatures is that you can use simple clip lamps and the way the light bounces because of the short distances. The worst part, the way the light bounces because of the short distances.

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Scryffy creatures

The birch tree outside of Pikku’s house is home to some scruffy looking creatures. They might be some kind of owls, or a kind of bird anyways. At the start of the film, they are a couple, but at the end of the film, they have had a baby creature too.

I decided to make these creatures as hand puppets with a foam base. It took me about a day to make all three of them, including sewing the fur.

kropp0

The eyes are made out of plastic spoons I found in the basement. I covered the spoons with reflective tape that I mooched from Reklam och grafiska (Thank you!).

supoon

I made the eyebrows out of some aluminum wire that I glued fur on. Last I jabbed some black feathers into the creatures.

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Play the game

The inciting incident for Pikku to start looking for someone to share his life with is an old and quite bad NES game, Extricate the Girl 2. Pikku beats the final boss, saves the girl, and when watching the ending he decides to start looking for love.

Since Pikku is going to play an old NES game, I have to paint and animate an old NES game. Just making the pixel art can take as long as, or longer than making the entire short film, so I decided to make it an earlier, simple black box game.

The Game

A girl has once again been kidnapped by the evil Mega Brain and you have to save her and restore peace to the galaxy. But look out, this time the Mega Brain has brought seven henchmen, one more evil than the next. Fight your way through eight worlds filled to the brim with enemies, lava filled chasms, and action. 1-2 players.

The Mega Brain

The end boss of the game is a living brain, The Mega Brain, who fires brain energy at the protagonist. I chose a brain because Mother Brain is, conceptually, one of my favorite bosses (a brain sitting in a jar, not doing much of anything!), but it’s also a way to show how Pikku’s way of thinking is getting in the way of him finding happiness. I made the sprites in Photoshop and put everything together in After Effects. Thank God that I found RoundPositionScale. Without it, I would have had to write, or at least copy, lots and lots of expressions.

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To create a dating site

Pikku will use a dating site to find love (sittintedarheltensammen.com, translates to dontsitthereallalone.com) in the film. Even though the site will only appear for a few seconds, I still have to create it.

I started by checking a few dating sites and realized what they had in common were a picture of a couple and a sign-up box. I found a free image of a couple kissing in the sunlight that I used for background and made a signup box in photoshop.

Then I animated the mouse pointer and the typed text in After Effects.

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Blink of an eye

Blinking eyes is a great way to show the inner life and thoughts of a character. Pikku can furrow his eyebrows but lacks the skill to blink. Since I normally work in animation I find this a great limitation that my puppets can’t blink (it would have been much to complicated to implement and control).

Efter some debate I decided to break one of the golden rules of puppetry and let Pikku blink by animating eyelids ontop of his eyes in After Effects. When I look at the result I’m pretty shure I did the right thing as the small eyeblinks makes you focus a lot more on Pikku and his feelings.

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Pikku’s breath

The film about Pikku and his hunt for true love takes place in the winter. It’s dark, polar night and cold. If you have been here this time of the year, you know that each breath you take is clearly visible.

When Pikku is outside his breath need to show up, wich is a problem since he is a puppet that can’t really breathe and even if he could breathe, everything is shot indoors, where it’s warm.

So instead of building a smoke machine into Pikku’s throat, I decided to use hyper voxels in Light Wave 3D for the breath. I started by quickly tracking the nose-mouth area of Pikku with a null in LW. I then attached a particle generator to it. I timed his breath to where I thought it would be logical for him to breathe. When rendered I combined the breath with the video in After Effects.

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some thought about the visuals compositing pikku

Some thoughts about the visuals

When I’m not in the studio or at home building stuff for the film, I like to get some time in front of the computer, working with the filmed material in After Effects. To divide the work like this is not efficient, but it spares me a lot of neck pain to change up the work, since my neck has been close to a disaster the whole winter.

I’m not really skilled in compositing, I hace managed to key out the green screen, add some (temporary) backgrounds and add a few effects like visible breath (more on that later). To make things easier, I try to treat the film as I would if it was animation, only that the characters are puppets, filmed live.

About the visuals

My thoughts about the visuals of the film are to keep some of the silhouette style from where Pikku originated. Pikku Iso was created as a cut-out-shadow animation, pretty much in the same style as Phantom. (And that is a probably relative of Pikku that shows up in that animation). To accomplish this, it’s important to make sure there is something light behind the almost completely black characters. Outdoors there is always snow but indoors I have to plan ahead and make shure there is something bright behind where Pikku will be.

My hope is that the visuals of the film invoke the feeling of slightly scary 80’s childrens tv programming. Where everything feels a bit homemade and sockpuppets entertained on prime time. But ofcourse for adults and with a modern feeling.

I have been debating about whether to make the film in 4:3 or boring television standard 16:9. I did some tests in 4:3 and the emotions that came from that format, were quite different from the ones I got from the 16:9 version. I’m also fully aware that it might be my nostalgia that is influencing my thinking… As for now, I’m working in 16:9 but planning and shooting for a 4:3 version, should I change my mind.

In the end, most After Effects work is arm rod removal. I was going to keep the arm rods, like in classic Muppets, but I realized my rod movement were so stiff and nervously tense that it drew attention to itself. That means a lot more work for me! 🙁

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Time to start shooting

The time to start shooting with the puppets is finally here. Fist day was nothing more than trying out the lights and get the green screen up and running. My green fleece blankets that I bought for 20 sek each at Jysk worked better than I dared to hope for. The only problem I have is that the room is much too small.

Shooting, day 2

The second day was supposed to produce some material, but after a few hours of shooting it was clear, I would need a helping hand and a lot of secret magnets and machinations to make it work. In the end, my knees were too tired to keep crawling around on the floor and I decided to come back the next day instead.

Day 3

The mailbox scenes are probably the most difficult scenes in the entire short (except for a few scenes later in the film that I’m dreading). Well, day three went a lot better. Pikku and the mailbox were armed with magnets, pins and double sided tape. On top of that, I got a few helping hands from Yuki after she finished her work. And by the end of the day, I had gotten through all the Pikku stuff in the first scene of the film.

Dags att filma pikku iso

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