Building the Martian set...Mocking it up!

Now that I'm starting to come closer to building the set I've been looking closely at Ray's original sets for his Evolution project and Fairy Tail shorts, namely Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Grettel.

A young Ray Harryhausen animating Hansel and Gettal for his fairy tail
short stories (Photo courtesy of the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation)

Before I make my set however; I have one hindrance that Ray didn't have; I only have a small space ,roughly 9ft by 7ft, in order to film my animation I need to be clever with the set design and set up.

In order to try plan the use of my space and how much room my set will require I'm going to make a 1/8th scale mock up of my set space (I found a useful online converter via scalemodelersworld.com).

Using the university's lazer cutter on some black mount board, I am able to cut out all the pieces to make miniature "animation tables" and the rough scale of the "puppets", any waste mount board will be turned into mock set pieces to try achieve some of the layered techniques Willis O'Brian and Ray we masters of using in their work, and duplicate those at the correct scale later on.

Following on from many sketches, original ideas and redesigns of my storyboard I have come to the decision that the set needs to be a single set peice that can be broken down into two pieces (since two tables are 6ft in lenght).

I'm using two influential pieces from Ray's career as my own inspiration, 1933's Kong cliff top lair, and The Animal World Allosaurus & Stegosaurus clifftop battle, both use techniques I think will play important factors in my camera set up. Kong uses a locked off camera which is positioned low to the floor so the audience don't see the animation table on the floor, however this may prove a problem as it was filmed in black and white. The Animal World uses two camera positions, a low camera with a foreground plate to hide the table and give the illusion of a cliff edge, as well as a elevated camera where the land is disappearing into the event horizon hiding any possible tie down holes.

For my set I will be adopting the rear wall and front cliff to act as the cliff "natural bottle neck" to the area, the rear wall will be a seperate peice that can split into two incase the set needs to be broken apart or moved for better camera angles, the foreground cliff will be a second free roaming piece that can be adjusted for hiding the table top from view of the camera.