More Initial Character Design Sketches

Our Character Design artist, Ryan, has been hard at work and has produced the following initial sketches for several more characters found in our story. Below each is laid out, with a small description of the character, and the role they play in the film without giving too much away of course.

Michael is one of the three children who are in the first scene of the film, which opens to these children climbing around their grandmother, asking to be told a story.

This sketch will obviously be softened, to show his young age, and have color added in later on before being sent off to the sculptors for their part of the job.

Grandma is also in the opening scene of the film, enjoying time with her grandchildren.

The Servant may not seem like an important character in the film, since obviously he is hired help found in the castle. But because he is seen in several scenes throughout the film, and interacts with our main characters in those scenes, we wanted to make sure to give him a proper design from start to finish. The initial sketch here reminds one of turn of the century middle aged servants found in Austria and the surrounding region, where his mustache was in fashion at the time.

Julia is one of the two main characters in our film, fairly obvious since her name is in the title after all. Without giving too much away, she becomes somewhat of a damsel in distress at certain points, while being the hero in others. We are modeling her after the actress that has agreed to play the character's voice in the film, but also wanted her to have a look all her own. Large eyes, full lips and a somewhat small nose give her soft yet well defined feminine qualities.

Cat is the final character we are showing today, and while she will be the smallest of our cast of characters, I think her personality will stand above many of the others. Cat is a small talking mouse that has become friends with Julia, and ends up basically going everywhere with her. She may be small, but she is very opinionated to say the least. She will definately be a fun character for the animators to work with when she is in her final model form.

In the coming weeks we will be unveiling more initial character design sketches, as well as the designs as they progress towards their finished and finalized look. If you would like to see more of Ryan Huseman's work, please check out his site here http://ryanhuseman.com/home.html .

Also coming sometime in the next couple of days, one of our sculptors will be showing how a clay oven is made, as well as explaining why they are essential to have around in a production like this.

Initial Character Designs

Well Ryan Huseman, our Character Design Artist has been busy at work and has produced some great initial sketches for three of our film's characters. These are rough, initial sketches, but like I have stated in the past, we want to show all aspects of this process from begining to end, and feel that this is a great opportunity to show how a character develops from an idea into an onscreen presence.

Here you see our wonderful bad guy of the film, Wolfstead.

Next you can see the begining design for King Macpherson, the hero's father in our little story.

And our final sneak peak at the character design process is a look at Dumall, Wolfstead's sidekick.

None of these are finalized character designs, and work is being done already to further breathe life into these characters with small changes and modifications.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to toss me a line, or leave a comment. Thanks for stopping by, and come back in the coming weeks as more pics will be posted showing what we have going on.

Behind the Scenes

I have received some correspondence from people that have been visiting the site, that they would like to see more behind the scenes stuff, how the puppets and sets will be constructed and how we plan on working things so that the faces of the puppets show more emotion than normally seen from a stop motion animated character.

What we plan on doing is showing all aspects of this process, from start to finish including photographs of the puppet building and set building as it goes along. We will be more than happy to share some of these secrets with the world, when we get to that point in the production, which is still quite a ways off.

We are hoping to start voice over recording sometime in February of next year, with sets hopefully being constructed while the film's sound track is worked over and made to sound oh so clean and crisp. At the same time, the puppets will be in the construction phase for use in front of the camera.

Between now and then we will be showing the creation of the characters from the drawing board, to the hands of sculptors as they turn lumps of clay into living breathing creatures, and onto the molding process where custom built armatures are built then covered in various materials to give us the final puppets. As many of you do know, this process is a long slow complex one that takes monthes to finish up, before we can ever step in front of a camera to start principal shooting.

Just wanted to drop a little update here for all of you, and to let you know what would be coming in the near future. Thanks for stopping by, and for all of the support.

Artist Update

I wanted to post and let everyone know that Ryan Huseman has signed onto the project officially as of a couple days ago. Ryan is a midwest artist whose talents are obvious from seeing his work for the first time. He is is an extremly talented illustrator who earned a BFA from the Academy of Art in Chicago. You can view samples of his work at http://ryanhuseman.com/home.html that are not related to the film.

He recently finished work on "Peter's Purpose" a children's book written by Jennifer Oramas, as it's illustrator.

Ryan has signed on as a Character Designer for the film, and we are looking forward to showing the world his artwork as he creates it.
  
In the coming weeks I will be posting some of his sketches and character designs for the film's production as we work through them. I believe that Ryan is going to be a huge asset to the production because of his artistic ability to breathe life into characters, as you can see from his home site. More to come in the future.

Blog Milestone

Well, don't ask me how, but we broke 1000 individual visitors to the blog earlier today. Not too shabby for a small blog. Keep coming backs guys, and thanks for the support!

Still Looking for Talent

Progress is moving along nice and slowly, as we expected it to, but in looking forward, we are still in need of more talent to help out with this wonderful little beast of a project we have taken on. If you are, or know someone that would be interested in something like this, please send them my way ASAP. Being local to the northeast Indiana region would be helpful, but not always needed, this is an obstacle that can be worked around.

We still have the following spots to fill:
1. several voice over acting parts, both male and female (a singing voice would be a huge plus)
always looking for anyone familiar with stop-motion puppet making

2. set designers/builders

3. costume designers/makers

4. Musicians, we have one person working on songs, but always looking for more input, as well as background musicians for the length of the film. Experience with Scottish or Irish traditional music would be a huge plus here.

5.A musical group for a special part of the film, your preferred musical style may not matter too overly much so long as you are flexible here.

6. A photographer/videographer. Someone interested in taking pictures and /or video of behind the scenes activities for later on.

If you have a talent that you think would be an asset to the production, even if it is not on the list, please feel free to email me at fallensaint1977@aol.com. Include your talent, contact information, location, etc.

Thanks for visiting and checking this out guys, hope to hear from many of you real soon.

BTW, I have not forgotten about posting more detailed information on cast and crew members, I will get to that as soon as i possibly can.

Cast Information-Ossey James

After posting two brief blurbs about two of the cast for the film, some of you started asking questions about who they were. I apologize for those brief posts that did not really provide any real info, other than the fact that the parts had been cast. So, today I am correcting that a bit by putting up some more information on one of our cast, specifically Ossey James. I will be doing the same for the actress, Laura Niemeyer, who is portraying Julia within a day or so.

Ok for those of you who do not know Ossey, he is an up and comer whose talents include acting, modeling, singing as well as songwriting. He is originally from Chicago, but moved to Los Angeles to expand his career opportunites. Born with a passion for music, he plays both six string and bass guitar, and the piano. He began writing songs and music around the age of thirteen and has not stopped since. His talent in this field has allowed him to work with several Grammy nominated producers and artists, as well as talent from Atlantic and Universal Records. Being the sole member of his family involved in this career field, he jokingly labels himself a "black sheep" of sorts.

He started to pursue a career in acting when he was 19, taking up training at Actone Studios and the Chicago Actors Studio, as well as countless hours of self study. Before getting into film and commercial work, he loved performing in live stage theatre, and was a gold medalist for acting at the World Championship of Performing Arts. Ossey has had the opportunity to work with A-listers such as actor Vince Vaughn and director/producer Ron Howard. He has also done various commercials for big name companies like Nintendo and Apple spoofs.

He continues to write music, act as well as model, and we are excited to have added him to our cast for the film. We chose Ossey for his unique voice and his almost scarey resemblance to the voice of Wolfstead that has been in my head since the start of this project.

 If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post a comment or question below, and myself or someone else will do whatever we can to make sure it is answered ASAP.

Cast Update!

Well the voice over part for  Julia, the female lead, has been filled tonight. Laura Niemeyer, a college student from the Chicago area, who recently started modeling has agreed to take on the role. Laura's voice, is in my opinion, a perfect match for what we have been looking for. In fact, we put off auditioning or discussions with other actresses because we felt so strongly she was the person to bring Julia's voice to life.
More to be posted at a later time.

Wolfstead

Great news, we have gotten Ossey James to agree to play the part of Wolfstead. I will post later on a little more info about Ossey, his talents, and his background.

Character Designs

I have spent the past week communicating with several artists who are contributing to the film, and have been blown away with what i have seen so far in terms of Character concepts and designs. The amount talent that some of these individuals possess blows my mind. I hope to be able to start adding images to the blog sometime in the next week. So keep your eyes out.

Talent Gathering

Well, we have put out feelers, ads, and been utilizing connections to put out the word that we are looking for artists of all different types to help with the project and have received a ton of responses. Looking forward to working with many of these individuals, and I plan on posting pictures of designs and concepts as they come in and we start making decisions on the direction we go with them.

First Post

Well, this is the blog where we will be posting updates for the film project that has been started, currently titled "Julia and the Wolf". The story is loosely based on the Little Red Riding Hood story, and will be shot using stop-motion animation. This project was started several monthes ago, but is still in what I would consider the early pre-production stages.
Currently we are working on hashing out character and set designs, as well as seeking out voice talent, songwriters and musicians and artists interested in being a part of this film.
I look forward to any comments or suggestions anyone may have as the project progresses through the various stages of production.