ball

'Ball' tells the story of a rock monster who lives in the ruins of an old Welsh castle. One night he awakes to find a strange and mysterious object sitting beside him. What is it? What does it want? With the help of his friend Spot the sheep, the Rock Monster slowly overcomes his fear of this unknown visitor and discovers the amazing secrets of . . . the ball!

Production Photos

Everything in this film had to be made by hand. All in all there were two sets, one background, three puppets, three balls and one chunk of grass. Below are some galleries showing how they were designed, how they were made, plus some behind the scene photos taken during filming.

Pre-production Designs

These are some early character designs for the Rock Monster, and a character known as 'the boy' who was the ball's original owner. He was in the first couple of drafts of the script but in the end was cut as I felt his character didn't really add anything to the story.

These are the armature deisgns for the three main characters. The final armatures did differ slightly from these initial designs but they give a good indication as to what was inside each puppet.

These are some character designs for Wolf, Spot and a character called Sheep who, like 'the boy' also didn't make the final film. Wolf was inspired by a combination of collie, wolf and hyena, to make him truly menacing. Spot is based on a real sheep I once saw at the actual castle the one in this film is based on.

These sketches show the thought process and planning that went into the set design for the castle and the opening 'sweep across the valley' sequence. The opening sequence up to the titles is a combination of eighteen seperate pencil drawings.

The Castle

The castle ruin that makes up the film's set is based on an actual castle called Dinas Bran, which sits above the town of Llangollen in North Wales, and is a familiar and recognisable landmark to anyone who knows that part of the country. Castell Dinas Bran is one of my favourite places and for a long time I have felt it would make an excellent setting for a film. So when I came to chosing a subject for my next project it was the obvious choice.

Building the Sets

This is the main castle set at the very start of construction. You can see the seperate blocks of oasis (the same stuff used in flower arranging) that make up the walls.

Next came the texturing, which was done simply by hacking away at the oasis with a craft knife to make it look like old stone wall.

The castle was then raised a bit using blocks of polystyrene. This was to create ground relief and texture later on.

I then painted the whole thing white. On the base I applied a mixture called 'gunk', which is a mix of paint, plaster and PVA glue. This helps to give the illusion of natural lumps and bumps such as grass and rocks.

After an undercoat of white I then painted the base colours on the castle and ground.

This is what the finished set looked like. It's wonderful what you can create with some oasis, wood, polystyrene, glue, paper, plaster, wire and paint!

Now the blocks are fixed together you can see the castle satrting to take shape.

This is after all of the texture has been applied. You can see the difference compared to the photo above; the edges are much softer and the walls are starting to look more real.

I then applied some good old fashioned papier mache to blend the base of the set and the polystyrene, and to add a bit more texture.

This is the secondary set which appears in only three shots in the film. It went through the same process as the main set. This is it post-papier mache.

The final step was to paint in shadows and highlights, as well as natural features such as moss on the stones and dirt on the ground.

As well as the main and secondary sets I also created a background. This sky was painted on a large canvas using acryics.

Building the Characters

Rock Monster was built from an alluminium frame with ball joints, with dense foam blocks to create ribs and a skull.

Spot was made from an alluminium wire skeleton, dense foam, fluffy material and stuffing. His head is a block of dense foam painted with acrylic, with wire ears covered in material.

The Ball is basically a blob of modelling clay painted with acrylic. He was made in varying stages of deflation to help with his transformation after his encounter with Wolf.

He was then covered in a velvety grey material and stuffed with teddy bear stuffing to make him lovely and squishy. I then painted him to make him look more rough and 'rocky'.

A lot of Rock Monsters emotions are shown through his eyes, so he has quite a few different pairs with varying degress of eyelid showing to create blinks, scowls and sorrow.

Wolf was built using plasticene around a basic alluminium wire skeleton. I chose plasticene for Wolf rather than material to make him look mean and greasy rather than cute and fluffy.

Lighting Tests

Before filming it is important to get the right atmosphere on set. These photos show how putting different colour filters on the lights, and positioning the lights in different places changes the mood on set. There were many more of these tests but I thought I would just give you a taste of them here.

Filming

In order to get the set at the right height for filming, and lacking in a proper animation table I had to improvise but stacking a few ordinary tables on top of each other.

Here you can see Rock Monster mid-blink getting his eyes changed over ready for the next frame. You can see the selection of eyes used to create the blink on set.

This photo shows both the main and secondary sets, plus the lights, camera, and the various tools and building materials used for touch ups and on set repairs - the 'ball' filming studio!

The set was surrounded by three spotlights sporting an array of coloured films to create the right atmosphere. On set you can see Rock Monster being filmed with the Ball.

Here you can see the Ball suspended by wire mid-bounce. All of the wires were removed in post production using photoshop; a long and often frustrating process.

'Ball' Film Posters

In the lead up to this films online release I ran a poster campaign to prepare everyone for it's arrival. I didn't want to give to much away in terms of plot so I just included little hints as to what was instore.

'Ball' Film Trailer

Prior to a films release it is customary to drum up interest with a trailer, and so I created one for 'ball' to give people a little taste of what was coming. You can watch it here below.