“Taking Flight” was a short project for my 2nd year at university, back in 2010. The brief was to choose a story, make a loose adaption of it, design it and shoot it under a rostrum camera using only analog means. We weren’t allowed to use any computers for post-production or animation, besides for editing and color correction. What made the project even more interesting was that we each had only 2 weeks of pre-scheduled time under the rostrum camera, so everything had to be ready for shooting on a pretty tight schedule.
On this project I worked with my fellow student Rhubab Shakir, who did a lot of the animation and the adapting of the story. I was just beginning to take interest in pre-production and design, so I decided to focus on designing the visual style of the short. We decided to make a loose adaption of Edgar Alan Poe’s “The man from the crowd”, filming using paper cut-out animation.
Rhubab though it would be interesting to use birds to tell the story, and I quickly agreed with her. Adapting Edgar Alan Poe, using birds as characters and a raven as a protagonist was a cool idea and it also played homage to one of the author’s most iconic works.
In the design of the characters, I was mostly inspired by shadow-puppet theater. The story was pretty dark, so I focused on using a limited color scheme, just black and white, and developing strong, different silueths, which would show the different bird’s social standing.
These were the higher ranking birds of the tree, which live closer to the top.
The first few versions of the upper class birds. The desigh was still very simple here, and the final ones have a more ornamental feel to them. The work title of the film at that time was “Ravens”. One of the 2 dated pieces of concept art from the project.
Several versions of the middle-class birds, which build nests.
Several versions for the worker birds, which are woodpecker and builders. They build and strenghten the branches for the house-birds.
The scale of the varouas birds living in the tree.
Having a limited time to shoot, the film is set in one place – a giant, floating tree. I used a little bit more colors in making the tree, but still tried to keep it pretty dark and simplistic. As I said, I was just starting to learn how to design stuff for animation, and looking back at it, I think I made the tree a little bit too active and the characters sometimes get lost in it.
Several versions of the final concepts for the background.
The final version of the main background, which was used for all the wideshots in the film.
When the whole film was designed, I used the basic set and made a very detailed storyboard. This would save us time in the shooting later on, and I would also use it to paint the backgrounds for the close-up shots and figure out the scale of the models in the various shots.
Everything so far was created in Photoshop, and was later scanned, printed, cut apart and assembled into puppets. We managed to shoot the entire 3 minute film in exactly 2 weeks.
Dimitar Petrov 