PL&TN: day 6

Today I drew some maps and made little models of some of the buildings I need to draw for the film.    I think it is already really useful to have drawn a big map of the whole territory,  even if some of these places I've drawn won't even be places that the audience ever sees . . . Everything is made of paper cuts and is mainly in silhouette, so it's quite a 2D world, but I wanted to feel that the place that the characters live in is real and give the audience a sense of geography, I also think that it's a way of trying to match the quite complicated and detailed shadow puppets if the world they live in is dense and full of little details - that a river goes through the town, or that there is a viaduct that runs all along one side,  even if i only show these things for a couple of seconds in the background I hope that it'll bring some sort of cohesion to everything.

I find it difficult to justify in my brain all this careful planning, as I usually prefer to work more spontaneously, but now having made a few little films I'm starting to learn that the preparation and research is just as important (sometimes) as the actual puppet-making and filming.  Here are models of two of the buildings - the school-room and the tea-room, both still un-furnished . . . both scenes need shots in these rooms from quite a few different angles and so I thought it would be helpful to have a physical model to work from.   Except now I want to make some little films in these models instead . . .