Our Blender Project, Bus World, was a pretty successful endeavor despite its rather large hiccups.
We started out with much more ambitious plans- we had an entire storyline, where Suzy had a best friend named Tuzy, where Suzy’s journey through Bus World taught her lessons about life and following your heart. But Courtney snapped us out of our delusion and let us know that there is no way that we would have enough time to put all of that in 2 minutes. So, we simplified it, and despite the simplified version still being potentially a little too long, we (Clayton and I, who wrote the story), were determined to make it work. I think if Cedar was there for the planning and writing of the film, things would have been a little more normal… but it was Clayton and Sana. As Brit says, it was bound to turn out kind of bizarre.
This project was simultaneously so fun and stressful. We totally underestimated the amount of time it would take to do the crafting aspect- especially because I didn’t know what tiling was, and was trying to make large props involving printed digital artwork. Courtney once again staged and intervention to let us know of the existence of tiling, which suddenly made things move so much faster… but I was having an absolute meltdown throughout that, since I was trying to manually figure out sizing (knowing what size paper to print different sections, accounting for proportion with the puppets and backdrop).
Clayton made and brought the sock puppets- which turned out awesome. They also made them remarkably expressive, and the hand-acting was so well done.
Throughout all this, Cedar was such a trooper. 0 complaints about the bizarre story and character ideas. She was basically like, “ok let’s make it happen”. She took on the task of finishing cutting the bus out of the foam core (and succeeded beautifully). And she knew exactly what she was doing when she finally started filming- it looked awesome.
Fun project- I wish we had a little more time but it’s our fault for deciding to do something so labor intensive. But it was a much better alternative to getting in front of the camera and acting something out.