Finally, 'Mysterious' Ron Cole has decided to start a blog. Now that I'm in the last phase of shooting my short film, In The Fall Of Gravity.
This film of mine has been years in the making but, not all of those years were devoted to this short film alone. As a matter of fact, There was never supposed to be a short film at all!
It all started when I decided to write a script for an animated feature film entitled
TRUE MAGIC
I've had this dream for too many years of creating a film with a new and different look and style of puppet animation. The first order of business would be to write the script and also create and shoot at least one of these puppets. The idea was to make a miniature puppet that could articulate speech and facial expressions in a manner similar to E.T. and Yoda.
This would require many hours, days, weeks and months to dream up the best methods to use in order to make a relatively tiny puppet face do the sorts of things that (in the past) had only been done on full scale, live action puppets.
How could I possibly ask an executive producer to forward me gobs of money to make a feature film, without demonstrating that I wasn't just 'blowing smoke' with the claim that this could and should be done?
I spent over a year of my 'spare' time (as if there really were such a thing) creating a puppet of the main character from TRUE MAGIC, Trevor Verity. I won't drag you through the hair pulling I endured trying to overcome the technical problems that emerged, I'll just say that I learned the reasons why it had never been done before.
After building a version (after many) of this puppet that actually worked, I shot a one minute clip of 'him' speaking to an invisible (off screen) partner... NOW I really had something! I knew then, that I could build another puppet from scratch that would perform even better than Trevor, his co-star from TRUE MAGIC, Isomer the Wizard.
I could go on about how many times (endless) I found new and better ways to improve upon the mechanics (which always involved a major overhaul of the puppets) and perhaps in future blogs I will go deeper into their evolution, but not now.
At that point, I had two working puppets, so what's the next most logical thing to do? What I had never planned to do - a short...
This film of mine has been years in the making but, not all of those years were devoted to this short film alone. As a matter of fact, There was never supposed to be a short film at all!
It all started when I decided to write a script for an animated feature film entitled
TRUE MAGIC
I've had this dream for too many years of creating a film with a new and different look and style of puppet animation. The first order of business would be to write the script and also create and shoot at least one of these puppets. The idea was to make a miniature puppet that could articulate speech and facial expressions in a manner similar to E.T. and Yoda.
This would require many hours, days, weeks and months to dream up the best methods to use in order to make a relatively tiny puppet face do the sorts of things that (in the past) had only been done on full scale, live action puppets.
How could I possibly ask an executive producer to forward me gobs of money to make a feature film, without demonstrating that I wasn't just 'blowing smoke' with the claim that this could and should be done?
I spent over a year of my 'spare' time (as if there really were such a thing) creating a puppet of the main character from TRUE MAGIC, Trevor Verity. I won't drag you through the hair pulling I endured trying to overcome the technical problems that emerged, I'll just say that I learned the reasons why it had never been done before.
After building a version (after many) of this puppet that actually worked, I shot a one minute clip of 'him' speaking to an invisible (off screen) partner... NOW I really had something! I knew then, that I could build another puppet from scratch that would perform even better than Trevor, his co-star from TRUE MAGIC, Isomer the Wizard.
I could go on about how many times (endless) I found new and better ways to improve upon the mechanics (which always involved a major overhaul of the puppets) and perhaps in future blogs I will go deeper into their evolution, but not now.
At that point, I had two working puppets, so what's the next most logical thing to do? What I had never planned to do - a short...
