Gardens of Miranda Episode 1

At long last, after 3 years of work, Episode 1 of Gardens of Miranda is finished. I spent the first year writing, designing and constructing models, props and puppets, followed by 2 years of animation.

Shooting this proved to be a true learning process and I'm looking forward to putting all of it to use on episodes 2 and 3, which I expect to average around 2 minutes in length. There was a lot of exposition to work into episode 1, something that won't be as true for successive installments, so the pacing will pick up and include more characters and action sequences and a darker tone overall.

Episode 1 Image Gallery

Here's a selection of photos showing set-ups and lighting in the shots where FE discovers the Redhead in the tree-tops. The tree crotch is hollow and is comprised of a resin skin applied over a cardboard and paper substructure. Despite my efforts at keeping it light-weight, at roughly 4.5 feet tall by 3.5 feet wide, it was bulky and awkward to handle and to stabilize for filming. I've since devised a more manageable alternative for shots like this.

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Jack Pure-Folly. I wanted this character to be large enough to allow for some intricate surface detail and to be able to sustain a convincing close-up. I also wanted to use ball-joints instead of wire for his fingers because I didn't want to deal with replacing broken finger wires in the middle of a shot. These requirements resulted in my building a 17" tall puppet.

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The Redhead, the subject of Jack and FEs field study. A colony of these elephant-sized creatures lives in the tops of the trees, which are actually colossal succulents with huge liquid-filled leaves and soft spongy bark.

This 18" tall model has a cast resin head and a foam latex body, built up directly over the armature and covered with a latex skin. Lionel Orozco's Kong armature provided a basis for the Redhead model. To save time, I decided to reconfigure Lionel's beautiful ape skeleton.

I removed the hands, feet and skull and replaced them with newly made, suitably alien parts, made a new hip girdle in the style of my earlier ribcage for Kong and added a tail and a tie-down point in the upper back. The hands and feet have tie-down holes too, but I figured it might be useful to add another larger one in the back to allow the option of attaching a Manfrotto camera arm for use as a heavy-duty support rig.

Episode 1 Preview

We now have more of Episode 1 of our stop-motion animated web series to show you. This takes us up to shot 34 out of a total of 50 for this first installment, so we're slowly getting there. As you might assume from watching the film, I had to use a variety of support systems to "fly" the characters around, but for practical reasons decided against hanging them from wires connected to an overhead gantry, so the scout ship, FE and the bugs were attached to floor-based rigs for all their scenes.

Everyone who has worked on this is keen to hear some feedback, so please let us know what you think of it so far.

Concept Art Illustrations

Here are some concept art for Gardens of Miranda. The first one, a wide view of the forest where the main action takes place, by famed paleo artist Douglas Henderson, best known for his restorations of Earth's distant past.

Douglas Henderson & here

Based on the above Henderson forest concept art, a photo composite test image was created (below). I shot different sized model trees, vines and seedlings against a blue backing, using  the same lighting set-up, and Greg Bossert and I spent a few hours on the computer placing, stretching, squishing and color correcting the various elements until we got an image that approximated the artwork but was photo real, because we used real photos.

The other art concept illustration below, is a wide low-angle view of the desert and the monolith where our story unfolds, was done by movie concept artist Brian Matyas.

                                       

Brian Matyas

Another view of the Heli-bug puppet, one of several forest inhabitants.

Stop Motion Heli-bug and Kong Armature to be Transformed

In the debut of Gardens of Miranda journal-blog, I posted some teaser photos. Here are a few more photos of the bug and a couple of full reveal photos of the 'formerly known as Kong armature', before it was subjected to the surgery transformation.

This photo below shows a belly-view of the unfinished and unpainted Heli-bug, one of the forest inhabitants in Gardens of Miranda.

Most of the body parts were sculpted in clay and cast in urethane resin from silicone molds, then linked together with a variety of single and double-ended ball joints. Due to the size of the tiny joints, the limbs have some limitations in their movements, but they worked out fine, especially as the bugs spend most of their screen time flying and hovering. Here is image of the completed Stop Motion Heli-bug puppet.

Below are a couple of shots of Lionel Orozco's beautiful 18" tall Kong armature, originally made for my 2007 stop-motion short Skull Island. Lionel delivered the armature completed except for the ribcage, hip girdle and skull, parts which I later made and added, but ultimately it was never used for it's intended purpose. With the advent of Gom, I decided to reconfigure Kong into another character important to the story-line, and machined and added some new parts. Photos of  'that' new character will be posted in the coming weeks.

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Welcome - 'Gardens of Miranda' Sci-Fi Stop Motion Series

The year is 2185, and astrobiologist Jack Pure-Folly and his assistant Effie are conducting a field study on the newly-discovered planet Miranda, during the course of which they make some startling discoveries. Jack and Effie also happen to be robots.

Miranda’s atmosphere is lethal to humans, so Dante, the field study’s supervisor, decides to send the two robots to gather data and allow him to conduct the expedition remotely from his ship in geosynchronous orbit above the planet. Everything goes according to plan for the first two weeks, and then things start to get interesting.

This is the debut of my journal about the making of Gardens of Miranda, a stop-motion animated film designed as a per-episode downloadable series. The world of Miranda is realized through models and miniature stop-motion puppets, all animated sequentially in a frame by frame process. Those frames are assembled into shots and sequences and combined with a wide array of additional elements to create the final film.

I will be doing online updates about the production, making of, overview of the creation of models, miniatures, puppets, and other aspects of this project.

The above photos are samples of the behind the scenes. As I proceed with this journal, I will post more details & description. In a few weeks, as they become available, I will be posting teaser clips of the animated sequences. So stay tuned & boomark Gardens of Miranda and/or subscribe to this blog-journal's RSS Posts feed (see right sidebar).