What if Grandma Had Wings?

My last film during my time at UCA Farnham was a bit of a stress bucket.

What if Grandma had Wings? was another stop-motion animation, but composited into a town in After Effects.

Now, initially the end look of this film wasn’t supposed to be like this at all. I actually made each of the buildings you can see in this film in balsa wood, including a lovely church and a big school and they are now dotted around my house. But unfortunately, I had a blip in terms of scale and made the buildings too small for the Grandma puppet. That was the first snag… The next one came to all of the hand-drawn parts of the film, which were always intended to be cut out and photographed alongside Grandma, so that the end look was Grandma in a paper and cardboard world (as she was of a different world), but that fell down as well. I just could not get the paper puppets to work alongside Grandma and they did not look great when photographed.

After a lot of stress, I had to admit defeat on trying to shoot everything together from life and modelled the entire town again, but this time in Softimage XSI (may it rest in peace). However, this didn’t make each shot smoother either, as my computer was incapable of rendering anything from XSI with textures (wow), so in the end the buildings from XSI were used as a template for rotoscoping in Photoshop. This was OK, as most of the shots were static, but there was one shot (the bit with the bird) which had hundreds of frames and I had to enlist my friend in Sweden to help me texture them all.

There are parts of this animation which I’m proud of, such as Grandma herself. She’s a nicely made puppet. She has an articulated metal armature, foam body, latex and clay hands, a clay head, real mohair for hair (awful to key out), a scarf and headscarf knitted with tiny needles so that the knit wasn’t out of proportion with the puppet and very stereotypical Grandma-like clothes (or rather, Grandma clothes I remember from Grandma’s when I was small). She does also have wings, which were paper and wire and broke on the second to last day of filming, but I’m not a fan of those. My step-dad and I also made her a rig which could just about keep her up, but not for very long and it required constant tightening. We also created a huge green-screen flying contraption for her which was like a green wooden rollercoaster with grooves for her rig as she wasn’t the best at flying horizontally.

Before this film, I had only used After Effects once. So even though the end result is quite rough around the edges, it taught me a LOT about the fundamentals of After Effects and now I use the things I discovered during that time on a daily basis.