The big film-making activity for this month has been competing in the "48 Hours Furious Film-making Competition" in Auckland NZ.
We drew the genre of "Juvenile Delinquent".
We went the same way as last year doing stop motion animation with modelling clay.
One speed-up technique, we did most speech as close-ups by taking only 4 to 6 photos with various mouth positions then throwing those at our 2 x editors to arrange along the timeline opposite the sound. Gets those editors involved early doing "parallel processing".
Best move for this year was to recruit voice actors from a band I worked with to make video clips. This band, the "Frank E Evans Lunchtime Entertainment Band" plugged us into a folkie network of actors, comedians, and children's entertainers and they were great. Soundtrack was directed and recorded as a separate operation some 30km away by my co-director who sent it in by internet.
Generally all went well although we were wildly over-ambitious and we feel amazed that we threw together a result that does kinda reflect most of the story but with the rushed final editing showing. I got it across the finish line with 2 min to go.
"How EUROPE got its Name" is based on a story from ancient Greece. Our ancient city of Tyre 1000BC was mostly made out of file boxes. We printed out paper sheets of computer-file brick, wood and stone textures and glued those on the boxes.
We had some modelling clay characters from last year and earlier movies that we remodelled. We were character and set building till Sat 4:55pm when we fired the first of about 700 stop-motion shots.
Our last year's modelling clay entry, "Dancing with the Pollies", similar approach, is on youtube as a tidied up version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD3WkV0sUGg
Reviewer "Godfather" writes:
"How Europe Got Its Name" by MITCIT (Juvenile Delinquent)
These guys always come up with something from left field, and this was no exception.
Where do you find inspiration for a Juvenile Delinquent story? Why, Herodotus, of course! For a claymation musical about a fairly obscure moment in ancient Greek history, this got a huge audience response. B-
