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.