Looking for the Mouse

With my video idea down on virtual paper, I have decided to take todays session to focus on finding the right cartoon mouse to be depicted in my video.

[I will be going back to finishing up my analyses with a few different blog entries over the next few days].

So, the mouse footage will be filmed in stop motion. This is to centralise on the idea of the mouse being trapped in time, rather than having moved on. This leads my areas of research to be defined by two logical values:

*Cartoons filmed in stock motion.
*Old mouse characters between 1800-1950's.

Stop motion, a brief history

(Claymation)

Probably the most people commonly associate with stop-motion animation, claymation has been around since at least 1908, when the short film The Sculptor’s Nightmare wowed audiences and then four years later when Modeling Extraordinary did the same. These films started appearing more and more frequently because in 1897 an art teacher in the UK had invented plasticine: a non-drying clay that was easily malleable and would retain its shape well. Since it was easy to sculpt and manipulate, filmmakers soon found themselves using this instead of simply moving objects around and photographing them for their subjects.

Eventually animators started putting plasticine on top of wire-armature skeletons, which allowed them to move their models around with even more ease. This is the style of claymation that you see with Wallace & Gromit, Gumby, and even The California Raisins. Interestingly, the term “claymation” is actually a registered word, held by filmmaker Will Vinton, who created the anthropomorphic Raisins. He copyrighted the term in 1978 to refer to his films, although now it’s generally recognized as the generic term to refer to plasticine / clay animation.
The rise in popularity of claymation accelerated through the late 70s, when Vinton and Aardman Studios started producing his short claymation films, through the 1980s which gave us the world’s first stop-motion animated film in Will Vinton’s Adventures of Mark Twain. The 1980s also saw the appearance of of Wallace & Gromit for the first time. Although they starred in a series of shorts, they finally had their feature film debut withCurse of the Were-Rabbit in 2005, although they were pre-dated by Chicken Run in 2000 as Aardman and Dreamworks’ first feature-length claymation film. Interestingly enough, Nick Park of Aardman and Wallace & Gromit fame did stop-motion claymation animation for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” music video, which features object animation, direct manipulation animation, claymation, and pixilation.
(Taken from, http://www.slashfilm.com/geekbomb-a-brief-history-of-stop-motion-animation/ )

Old mouse characters:

Atomic Mouse - Funny mouse character create in 1953 by Al Fago

Steam boat Willie - Created 1928. Could be filmed as a moving picture (stop motion), rather than claymation

The mice who have interested me:



How much work to create the video (Roughly)

"For a 30-minute movie, there would be approximately 21,600 stops to change the figures for the frames (Ref. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_animation)."

My video will run at around the three minute mark
(roughly the length of my choosen song (Ref. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxM3Kf8uaYA this link may need double checking, at the moment I cannot find out who the artist who made the song is as it is a remix, however I know the song is from a game called Secret of mana star of darkness). This will mean I will about an equal (if not slightly longer) stop motion video, which calculates roughly the following:
21600 / 30= 720 * 3 = 2160.
So i need to capture between 2100 - 2500 pictures of my mouse moving on set.
I will split this into sections and then loop video where needed.
 
A brief plan:
-The song as specific sections that could almost be split into musical scenes. So listening to the song I would say there is a clear difference in the music every 20 seconds or so.
-20 seconds is a third of a minute. 1 minute = 720. 1/3 = 240.
-A three minute video would roughly from this calculations come to nine lots. However I think certain sections of music get repeated so this may save me having to do two of three sets of 240 shots (if there are three sections repeated at 20 seconds each)
-I need to create the character out of something easy to animate with, such as clay, or foam etc.
-Construct stage for filming.
-Look into cheap alternatives for green screening (If there is a way of filming the background of my set with a cheaper DYI solution this would be perfect as I could then have the video footage running smoothly when it is edited in later.

The song (background and why?)

The song I will be using in my music video is a song that has been taken from the super nintendo entertainment system game Secret of Mana. The version I will be using is a Teckno Remix and at the moment I cannot find reference to who created it (Video of song www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxM3Kf8uaYA).

The original song was composed by Hiroki Kikuta.