Scene 9 – Goose In Spotlight – Death Row

Before the Goose was killed, I really wanted to show off my model and the animation within the animal before it died. I also wanted to create tension before the death of the Goose and felt that I could achieve this in one scene.

The scene starts off with the camera focussed on the Goose in the centre of the screen. The goose is highlighted by a target spotlight on him to make him standout with nothing in the background whilst standing on wooden floorboards to create the effect of being in a shed or wooden farm building. The camera and target spotlight then spend about 15 seconds panning around the Goose whilst the goose is showing off different parts of the animation for example the legs moving, the neck bending and the tail feathers flapping. The camera eventually returns back to its original angle and zooms out to give the feeling that something bad was about to happen.

I felt that this scene could be regarded as one of the strongest scenes as long as it was created correctly. I wanted the viewer to feel like the goose was all alone and something bad was about to happen. In most films and animations, bad things always happen in the dark, which is why I have a dark background with nothing happening. The spotlight puts all of the attention on the goose and made him feel all alone.

The final effect that I had in mind of achieving was the feeling of being on “Death Row” where the goose has nothing they can do because they are going to be killed. The light and cameras along with the length of the scene create tension and a good build up to what is about to happen.

Scene 8 – Farmer Picking Up Axe

I thought about how I would be able to show the farmer killing the Goose. It was important that the scene would not be too gruesome as the main target audience is children learning and viewing the Fables. This meant that I had to think about a suitable way of killing the goose whilst also being realistic.

I decided that I could create an Axe that could be used to chop the Goose in half. I needed to have a Scene where the Farmer picked up the axe ready to kill the goose. This gave me a good chance to use a technique shown by the lecturer of picking up objects.

The scene starts with the farmer standing in a room with an axe sitting on a desk next to him. It is a very simple layout of the scene because I wanted the focus on the Axe and the technique of picking it up that I learnt from Richard this year. The farmer turns his head and his body to angle towards the axe so that he would be able to pick it up. His arm then moves down and he places his hand onto the Axe.

This is where I use the technique that I learnt from Richard where you attach the object to the bones of the Farmer. This then means that the axe is attached to the hand and is responsive to when I move the axe object. The hand moves dependant on where the axe goes, which made it very easy to animate whilst still looking realistic.

The scene finishes with the Farmer holding the axe aloft in the air after picking it up from the desk. He turns back to the front and to face the camera and changes his facial expression and mouth to have a big smile on his face.

Scene 7 – Farmer Thinking About Killing Goose

The main theme behind the Fable is the idea of greed. The greed comes from the Farmer who has already gained lots of money from his goose that laid a golden egg. Instead of waiting to see if this was a recurring scene, he is impatient and believes there will be gold inside of the egg. I wasn’t too sure how I would be able to achieve this though.

I then thought of a very simple but effective method that I could use to create this effect. Two scenes ago I had my Farmer thinking about selling his golden egg and making a lot of money from it. This scene worked well and portrayed the farmer’s thoughts to the audience so I decided to duplicate this Scene and change what the Farmer was thinking about.

I got the images of the goose in 2 halves from a model that I had created for a later scene. I edited the colour of the innards of the goose to a gold colour. I then placed an image of both the front and the back of the goose into the thought bubble. The animation and scenario in the scene are the same as in the previous scene. It gives the feeling that the Farmer is irrational and thinking of a quick success plan.

Scene 6 – Rich Farmer

In this scene we get to see the Farmer in a very happy mood because he has lots of money, which is on show for everyone to see. The scene starts off with a view from behind the farmer standing at a table or desk. The camera then pans over his shoulder and focuses on the stacks of money on the table. After panning across that mass amount he has, the camera then zooms out and focuses on the farmer. He is standing there with his arms out as if to say “Look at all my money” and he has a huge grin on his face.

The strongest part of this scene is definitely the money on the table. I considered many different ways of representing money such as Dollar Symbols, Expensive clothing and gold in the scene. I decided on using this method as I felt it really got across the fact that he has a lot as it is all stacked up. I think the money looks very realistic and is one of my favourite parts of the whole animation.

It is a simple plain with a material of a dollar bill added to it however I wanted to make sure that the overall stacks looked realistic. My first idea was just to create a set of stacks of planes with no materials added to them and then just attach one with the material to the top. This looked rubbish because on the side camera shots, you could see that there was no material added to them. To conquer this I added the material to all of the planes and from the side it looks very realistic.

I was very happy with how this scene came out because I found it hard to come up with a way of showing the farmer with all his money. I considered many different options but then thought about having him basically show it to all the people watching the animation. This builds up the idea of him being cocky and arrogant as he wants to always show off.

Scene 5 – Farmer Thinking About Selling Egg

This is where the farmer becomes extremely happy in this story. He has discovered that he has a Golden Egg, which is obviously extremely rare and his first instinct after seeing it is to sell it, the sign of a good businessman obviously. This scene was very important to the overall storyline as he needed to sell the egg to gain his fortune. I struggled to think how to portray the idea of him thinking about the sale.

The best way that I thought of was to use a “Thought Bubble”. Along with Speech bubbles, thought bubbles are used lots in cartoons so I thought that it might work well in the cartoon animation. The scene sees the farmer standing behind his desk with a thought bubble coming out from his head. Inside this bubble is an image of the golden egg, along with an “=” sign followed by a “$” sign. This gives off his thoughts of “Golden Egg = Money”. I felt that this would be easily interpreted and therefore a good way of getting the message across.

Along with the thought bubble, I felt that the scene needed some animation otherwise it would have been extremely boring. I thought about what kind of actions people take and do when they come up with a good idea. The first thing I thought of was to have the farmer nodding his head. This gives off the impression that he agrees and is happy about his idea. The second part of animation is the farmer’s mouth, which starts off with a normal look but ends the scene with a big cheesy smile. This backs up the idea of the farmer being very happy.

Scene 4 – Picking Up The Golden Egg

In scene 4 the farmer is picking up the Golden Egg that he has got from his Goose. I decide to make this scene from the point of view of the farmer. I felt that this gave the person viewing the animation the feeling of being more involved with the scene as it is as if they are the farmer. I believe this is very effective.

I added a Target Spotlight to the scene. I did this because I wanted to emphasize that the farmer was picking up the Golden Egg, which obviously doesn’t happen very often. I wanted to make it seem as if the egg was a gift from God and therefore the light would be coming from the sky and highlighting the Egg.

The Egg has a gold colour to it obviously because that fits in with the Scene and the storyline. I did originally create a shiny gold texture to the Egg when modelling it. Unfortunately when I placed the egg into this scene with the texture, it made it impossible to get the Egg to be easily viewable to the person watching the animation. With a lot more time and available skills, this probably would have been possible but unfortunately my skills are limited so I had to settle for a Gold colour.

Scene 3 – Finding The Golden Egg

This is the scene where the farmer finds his golden egg that has come from one of his geese. The scene starts off with a camera shot to the side of the farmer as he walks towards the goose. This works well with the end of the previous scene where we saw the farmer walking away from his house. It works well because it is as if the camera has just changed and the farmer did not stop walking.

The Walk Cycle of the farmer creates a turn for the Farmer towards the goose. The camera then is behind the farmer but zooms in and focuses on the goose that is now in front of the farmer. The Goose has some animation, which involves him standing up and laying a Golden Egg.

I was very happy with how the cameras came out in this Scene. I wanted to make sure the walk cycle was captured as it was a good way of showing off what I’ve learnt this semester. The turn in the direction of the walking shows that I was able to edit the basic cycle to make it work better for my animation.