Tales from the Towers is a stop frame animation film series I have been working on for over two years now. And I still haven’t shot a single frame. Getting close though.
The Characters
The Towers
Tech Stuff
The Film Rig
Scene Building
Character Building
Synopsis
In the future, people live in towers, huge tall towers stretching far beyond the clouds.
Most people have never been to ground level.
The towers are close enough that adjacent towers can be seen in the distance, in all directions. They trade with each other via wires, and the towers are in some way supporting each other by these stretched wires.
Visually the towers resemble shanty towns, on top of each other, shabbily built with walkways and staircases running around the outside, but they do have differences, some are richer or better managed, they use different shapes, building techniques and colour schemes.
The inhabitants of Tower 1023, on which our story is set, try to make it as pleasant as possible with plants growing and quaintly painted structures. Its built randomly, rooms and buildings connected loosely to a central stairwell and elevator. Nearby is the delightfully green and fruitful Tower 1022 where hexagons and geodesic domes greenhouses are popular and the dark, industrial sinister Tower 1021 built from various pyramid and triangular shapes.
The history of the world is never explained but war, air and ground pollution seem to be the main reason for the towers existence.
We slowly learn that not all the towers are run democratically by caring leaders, but that some are operated by dark evil forces. Tower 1023, the tower on which the story is set, might be poor and ramshackled but luckily, is not one of them. Despite the wildly different reality of this world, we are charmed by how simple and ordinary life is in these sky-scraping scrap cities, anything can happen here, laughter, fear, joy, sadness, even love.
Every 5th film or so, a slightly wobbly, hovering shot is used, with wide angle and blurred edges. This shot is accompanied by a quiet whining sound.
Occasionally we see small flying diamond shaped drones, fly past in outdoor scenes. We initially don’t connect the two.
We realize that Equiss is actually being spied on by one particular drone, the girl is irritated at first, attacks it, then plays with it, treats it like a pet, and hides it from her parents. One day the drone arrives with a note.
“I think I love you”
The Characters
The main character is Equiss Jones, the teenage daughter of Fronk and Erudite Jones.
The Towers
Tower 1023
The tower where the story happens, on a floor thats a little bit above the clouds.
The inhabitants of Tower 1023, on which our story is set, try to make it as pleasant as possible with plants growing and quaintly painted structures. Its built randomly, rooms and buildings connected loosely to a central stairwell and elevator. This is home for the Jones family.
Tower 1021
It is the starting point of the film, and home of the Droneboy.
Dark, industrial sinister Tower 1021 built from various pyramid and triangular shapes.
The residents are tall. thin & militaristic.
Tower 1022
A delightfully green and fruitful tower that’s very involved with growing plants and food.
Visually it has gardens and layers of hexagons and geo-domes. Water runs in tubes all around.
Tech Stuff
Part of the enjoyment of animation for me is that it requires many disciplines.
Its requires patience during the filming process, stop frame is very slow. Using todays modern techniques, ts pretty nerdy, suing Dragonframe to control almost everything from filming, camera control and movement, audio and shot planning, everything is kind of “in one place, tidy and controllable. At its most basic, its actually pretty simple, but gets complex as you add things like motion and lighting control.
Scene Building
I love to make stuff. It’s the most relaxing thing I know. I’m not a super high quality model maker, it must be said, but that’s perfect for this film. I actually built the model for Tower 1023 in the way that I felt that the inhabitants would have built it. I started with a main structure, and tried stuff out. Beginning with simple cardboard box shapes. This were replaced along the way with more sturdy load bearing parts and wooden of metal walls. Everything made from scrap, found materials. I even went around the forest picking up old rusted metal cans, which I straightened and cut out to clad some of the walls.
The film rig
Especially for the film I have built a motion control rig, powered by dragonframe. It consists of a table, with 4 pillars. Rails connect 2 pillars that support a moving gantry, the gantry has a vertically sliding rail on which is mounted a pan and tilt head for the camera to be mounted. Each direction is connected to a pulley that is operated by a motor. The motors can be programmed in Dragonframe to move an axis by an amount.
In total I have 6 axis. X and Y, that is so say forward/back and left/right, Z, up and down, pan and tilt and in addition I am currently adding on extra motor to control focus. This will enable me to plan a complex camera move in macro magnification, on small details on the tower and after getting it just right, it will return to frame one and I will begin animating the characters as the camera moves frame by frame.
My rig is not perfect, I will use this film as a guinea pig to test and refine it. The now follows a series of photos taking during its life. starting with a simple slider on a table… after setting this up I set to thinking… wouldn’t it be good if I could… etc So I had to reseach the use of NEMA 17 motors, drivers, arduino interfaces and cabling to the dragonframe software… it was quite a headache
Its Character Building!
Of course my film needs characters. I’m still researching and testing the best way to do this. Ive tried 3D printing ball and socket rigs and there’s one great system for that, but I’m also trying the professional way with proper metal armatures. Theres also simple twisted wire arms, which might, for my needs ,actually turn out to be the best option. Or a mix of techniques.
My characters are going to be very small. Normal stop-motion armatures are about 30 cms tall, and mine need to be about 10, maybe 12cms tall. My plan is to also have some replacement head versions maybe just upper body torsos, for close ups when they speak (if they speak)
I’m also investigating and thinking alot about how they will look. Will they be realistic or cartoonish? Im tempted, despite the potential “uncanny valley” effect of going for some kind of realism. By 3d scanning real heads of people that will suit that character heads, and then 3d printing them after some re-working in Blender. The advantage of this is that I dont need to model them (im not a good sculptor) and I can re-printe breakages or build a set of replacement mouths or faces, for talking or emotions. Although regarding this last plint, my initial goal is simply to have the character make noises (Like in the computer game Ico, or the old stop-mo series The Clangers) And just have a simple open and closed mouth, plus shout, plus smile etc…
Anyway, its still early days in regards the characters, so Here’s a gallery, which will hopefully progress into finished people sometime.