Moe's on a brochure!

Last week USC held a ceremony dedicated the newly named Jeffery Katzenburg center for animation. Mr. Katzenburg, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Speilburg were all present and each gave a little speech. Much to my surprise Moe made an appearance too. He was all over the banners and brochures. I just plain lucked out here, I happened to be in the cubes when the guy was collecting artwork for the banners. It was still cool to see Moe amongst all the awesome USC work though!

Moe is in a fest!

Moe will be making his festival debut in the Long Day Short Film Fest June 21 in Alameda, CA!

Moe's Trailer

The official trailer for Moe's Musical Morning, my first year MFA film.

Mel and the Vine

Here is the animation that I projected onto the music school last Friday. Mel is the character that appears at the end of Moe's Musical Morning. Video of the actual projection will be up soon!

Moe Running on the Green Screen

Working on runs for the music freak-out sequence. I animated these on a green screen, using a flying rig and removed the rig in After Effects. This is my first time shooting a run, shooting on green screen, and removing a rig in post, so it's definitely been a learning experience! Next step is to key out the green screen and integrate it with the flash animation.

Visions and Voices Prep

I'm working on a projected animation for the upcoming Visions and Voices event at USC. This will involve either Moe or Mel (the orange guy, I changed his name from Max) climbing around on the music building. I've been doing flash tests to get an idea of where I want him to crawl around. I've also been doing some projector tests to figure out how bright the image needs to be. Here are a couple of the tests!

Shots From Last Week

I shot for 5 days strait last week, 12-15 hour days. It was a huge learning experience and here are a couple of short segments from the shoot!

Set Shots

Here are some pics from my week long camp out in the stop motion lab!
I had replacement mouths, eyes and eyebrows ready at the side.


Some pics of my final set and light arrangement. To get a sense of depth I built the back layer of trees out of cardboard and painted with tempera paint. The next layer is cardboard wrapped in wire mesh and thin foam, spray painted. The front layer is sanded balsa foam with tempera paint.



My classmate Laura was a HUGE help with the light set up. I was kind of in the dark about this topic and she really lit the way. We set up a large light with bounce on the side for the sun, lit the back layers of trees with orange and set up a light pointing down. On this upper light we added some black foil to give the illusion of light shining through leaves. The film takes place in the morning and we were really hoping to go for that feeling with this setup.


For the moss ground I used a sheet of thin foam and spray painted it green. This allowed me to conceal the drill holes pretty well, I just cut a little slit with a hobby knife each time I drilled a new hole.

Animation Tests

Headphones Build

I made this out of sculpy and matte board, but I am NOT liking how it is looking after painting. I think I'm going to try a second version with foam and matte board.

Set Build

I've started building my set. For vines I wrapped wire mesh in foam, coated with latex and painted with tempera. For leaves I cut up some green foam I got from the scrap bin at Foam Mart, and some Wonder Foam from Dick Blick. For the large trees I sanded down balsa foam, primed, and painted with tempera. So basically it is a world of foam... sweet sweet foam.

Set Design

Max's Design

Armatures

I built up the armatures for both characters this weekend. I'm experimenting with the hands, added some epoxy to the knuckle areas to try to give it more of a dimensional feel and less of the wire dipped in latex look... we'll see how it goes. I tested out one of the armatures walking... it's a little big, but so far so good.

The Animatic

Not quite finished yet. The musical freak-put part needs to be more nailed down and the ending is still a bit weird. But this is pretty close the the story of Moe:

Moe the Mockup

This is Moe 1.0. I started building him in a workshop last October. I worked on it throughout the semester, eventually adding foam and latex build-up and finished with a coat of blue acrylic paint. The head and replacement mouths are made from super sculpy. The eyes are these rad little magnets that I found at Dick Blick in Hollywood.
There are a few things wrong with this puppet that I will keep in mind when building Moe 2.0.
• Head is too heavy, making it hard to stand him completely strait a lot of times.
• Legs are two short, making walking very awkward.
• Body doesn't allow for bending.
• Hands are pretty small, might be weird on closeups.

For all his flaws, I did manage to get a few moves out of him though:

Inspirational Imagery

I knew from the beginning that I wanted this to be a stop motion piece, with a musical freakout part hand drawn in Flash.

Some of my stop motion heroes include Adam Elliot and the Aardman crew. Their work with eyes and facial expressions are what I am thinking of when I am thinking of Moe.

I think Pink Elephants on parade is one of the most amazing sequences from any Disney movie. The transitions and atmosphere are something I aspired to achieve a small fraction of. I want the musical part to be a combination of this, the shapes of Chihuly, and many other things




I'm archiving a full repository of inspirational images over here: http://louisjmorton.tumblr.com/

Initial Ideas

I originally had this idea of two monkeys that lived on an island, Fred and Fritz. One day a fruit drops out of the sky. Fred bites the fruit and it transports both monkeys to a new environment. This makes Fred very happy because he always had wanted to travel. But it makes Fritz very freaked out. Fritz grabs the fruit from Fred, bites it, and they are transported back to their home. They both realize that the fruit will take them wherever they want to go when they bite it. They go back and forth arguing, biting the fruit while the background changes from exotic local back to their peaceful jungle home. Eventually the fruit gets down to one last bite. Fred is about to bite it to send them to a faraway land when he notices how upset Fritz is. He bites it and they end up back home. At the end it is revealed that the island is now on the back of a giant flying creature, so both monkeys got their way.
Anyway, I decided this story was wayyyy to complicated for a one semester project. I had another idea where this little guy walks around listening to music and the background changes with the song. No story at all, just an idea.
I'm not sure when, but these two ideas globbed together and formed the story of Moe, an easily excitable monkey who hears music for the first time.