Early Name: "Whiteboard World"
When thinking of the idea for my next film following The Dreamer's Voyage, I decided it would be best to branch out and try to do something a little more complex that involved mixing two styles of animation together. I had always been interested in the idea of doing animation on whiteboards after watching animations on YouTube over the years like this one from 2006:
When thinking of the idea for my next film following The Dreamer's Voyage, I decided it would be best to branch out and try to do something a little more complex that involved mixing two styles of animation together. I had always been interested in the idea of doing animation on whiteboards after watching animations on YouTube over the years like this one from 2006:
I first got the idea to have it about a real-life hand torturing a clay figure after watching the short film by Daniel Greaves called "Manipulation." Initially, the plot was going to be a love story where a man wakes up in a strange world and draws himself a girl, which then becomes real and suddenly captured by the hand. The man would then need to use the drawings to try and save her from evil. I quickly abandoned this idea after thinking it might be too cliche and wouldn't be very engaging, so I thought it would be better to focus solely on the man vs. the hand with the main idea being him overcoming this evil force. In December of 2013, I purchased 4 whiteboards which I would then put together to make the world of Magic Marker, costing $100 in total. Here are some early behind-the-scenes shots:
Here are the first tests I did to get a feeling for the animation between the man and the drawings, so I would be prepared to do it in the film itself:
The main character of the film, dubbed the "Nameless Gentleman" by myself, was designed specifically to look like a very young child just being born, which why he is bald and given a very baby-like face. Initially I went for more of a square-look to the character, but I realized it looked too similar to the styling of the popular game Minecraft and scrapped it for a more realistic looking human. After creating the initial model of the character, I used feedback given to me by my parents to make the character more likable and made some adjustments so he would be able to better express himself using his face and body. He was made out of Van Aken's Plastalina clay, and had to be completely remade around 8 times throughout the filming of the movie.
Concept Art:
During the creation of this film, I was given the book "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell which talked about how David was forced to use unconventional means of attacking to take down the giant. I decided to use some of these themes in my this film, where after the man is being pushed to his limits, he is forced to use colored markers against the hand which end up being more powerful than the black-and-white drawings the hand was creating, aiding him in battle to his ultimate victory.
Some issues I ran into when filming was keeping my hand still during animation as I would often have to redo shots because the movement on the hand was very jittery. It became especially difficult because I was using my dominant right hand for the modeling, and my left for taking pictures, meaning it was very stressful to animate certain scenes since I would often be in very uncomfortable positions. Another issue came later in the film when the man creates a "dragon dog" to defeat the hand, where the animation on the dog flying became too difficult to accurately redraw every time it moved. My solution to this problem was by animating the wings separately and putting them on the dog through photoshop, and then cutting out the individual frames to use in the animation. Then I would just continually swap out the different frames in the animation which gave off the movement of the flying, and reduced my workload (as well as upping the quality of the animation on the dragon dog). Here are all the frames I cut out:
Some issues I ran into when filming was keeping my hand still during animation as I would often have to redo shots because the movement on the hand was very jittery. It became especially difficult because I was using my dominant right hand for the modeling, and my left for taking pictures, meaning it was very stressful to animate certain scenes since I would often be in very uncomfortable positions. Another issue came later in the film when the man creates a "dragon dog" to defeat the hand, where the animation on the dog flying became too difficult to accurately redraw every time it moved. My solution to this problem was by animating the wings separately and putting them on the dog through photoshop, and then cutting out the individual frames to use in the animation. Then I would just continually swap out the different frames in the animation which gave off the movement of the flying, and reduced my workload (as well as upping the quality of the animation on the dragon dog). Here are all the frames I cut out:
Here's a little behind-the-scene shot of the man drawing the dog in a see-through chalkboard-style scene:
And finally, here is the green screen shots at the end of the movie where the world falls apart being created.