As promised: part 2 of the making of The Bystander Effect (a short film which was part of the Hollow City Chronicles).
The set for the animation was intended as a sculpture rather than a set. The decision to use it for a film came later.
The puppet was made using the ever-popular wire and cushion foam technology. (Nick Hilligoss has a fantastic series of how-to’s on Picturetrail) The puppet, then, was too big for the set (and couldn’t, workably, be much smaller with that method of construction) so she was filmed against a green backdrop – made by painting some cheap canvases and a piece of 3mm MDF.
The canvases stand up with the aid of small clamps.
While the puppet stands up with help from a magnet – a small but powerful rare-earth one from an electronics store.
The series of photos were then fed into Cinegobs a wonderful freeware utility which removes the green and spits out an AVI file ready for editing with an NLE such as Adobe Premiere. (Yes, Premiere does do chroma keying but, strangely, not as well as Cinegobs!)