Ready to Paaarty!?

Stills of a select few of the over 50 tiny bug puppets created for the bug party scene in Halfland.

Instead of permanently installing the mass of overscale foliage designed to make the bugs appear even smaller than they are, I chose to build a separate set piece that drops on top of the full landscape.

It was two separate bug party sets now completed and fully dressed to shoot, one just for the Bug Band (featured in the next post), that sits as a modular set piece right against the white picket fence on the main set. In previous camera tests, I realized that having a larger scale object like the fence between the camera and the bug party made glimpsing the party that much more magical. To accommodate the bug dance floor and mushroom cafe circle, the stand-apart set was designed to sit in the main set's clearing, allowing for easy removal for daylight long shots of the main set. (d'uh, bug parties only happen at night.)

 After the Bug Party sets were completed and dressed, I took out the macro shooting gear to see how it was looking. I snapped the above without lighting, just to start to get a feel for how I'd like to shoot it.

Here are two things about it: one, the tiny, casual, crude bug puppets were never meant to perform articulate stop motion, at most, only meant for a gag here and there, a wriggle of a coated wire leg or antennae, etc. So, I hesitate to shoot it first up over the rest of Halfland clips for concern people watching may judge the entire production by this crude performance. But as I type that out loud, I realize ain't no one watching after 32 years! My previously interested blog readers had to have long since given up on me ever filming this series! So, maybe if I just put a disclaimer on the clips, folks may get the idea this party scene is meant to be my warm-up act.

The second thing is that the two weeks I took to build the large flowers and greenery, the years of making the occasional quick bug puppets, the week it took me to create the separate set pieces, etc. will end up in a shot lasting at most 5 seconds!!! All the handmade cake, band instruments, and wrapped gifts the size of pinky nails, all the figuring out how to block the shot, stage the little gag action, and hopefully make it a bit funny, all that, careful crafting over a very long period of its own, will provide just 5 brief seconds of life to enjoy. (Well, that and perhaps a photographically illustrated storybook) This is the nature of stop motion, which is likely why the art form is a bit of an anachronism today.

I couldn't love it more.

Watch for the next post on how these were made...